Erectile dysfunction and those antidepressants.
Thursday, August 28th, 2008Just to repeat the general messageof these books: when you are aged between forty and seventy years, you have a fifty/fifty chance of experiencing some degree of ED. Many people will lose thier erection at all. Alongside this news is the equally significant evidence of depressive illnesses. Researchers estimate that about a quarter of men will suffer some degree of anxiety or depression at some point during their lives. When this happens, the symptoms may not appear too serious and you will probably not seek treatment. But you are twice as likely to suffer decreased libido and ED than someone not depressed, leading you to reduce or avoid sexual contract for a while. Many of you will leave the depression, if such it is, untreated and buy Viagra, Cialis or Levitra online. This is an entirely understandable reaction. But it is always better to get a professional opinion before self-medicating.
This creates real problems for the physicians trying to balance treatments for both the depressive illnesses and the ED. Because there may be adverse reactions between the different medications, you should not take Viagra, Cialis or Levitra on your own initiative if you are already taking any other medications. Your physician has a number of options:
- The best, and may be not very reliable way is to change your antidepressant to another, with other side-effects. If you respond well to either of these, you may find that you feel less depressed and your sexual performance improves. Wellbutrin is also less likely to cause weight gain which may aid your choice of medication.
- It may be possible to lower the dose of the current antidepressant so that you still get some relief from the depression and your sexual performance improves. For example, in one clinical trial of Prozac (fluoxetine hydrochloride) some people responded as well to a dosage of 5-10mg as the more usual 20mg.
If you do seek advice and a depressive illness is confirmed, your physician will offer treatment. In such cases, the issue of cause and effect can become complicated. The ED may have been caused by the anxiety or depression itself, or there may have been an independent cause. But what began as a small problem can be aggravated as a side effect of the antidepressant medications you are prescribed. It is somewhat ironic that one of the factors depressing you may be your declining sexual performance, but the treatment for that depression can complete deprive you of your desire to have sex. As if it could get worse, the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) antidepressants not only affect sexual performance, but may also disturb sleep patterns and cause weight gain. Not surprisingly, this prompts many patients to stop taking the medication. Thus, although treatment using one or more antidepressants is usually successful in 90% of all cases, less than one third of patients complete the course of medication, and the incidence of relapse is high.
With some drugs, e.g. Zoloft (sertraline) and Anafranil (clomipramine), it may be possible to change the medication regime. If you have a fairly consistent time when you engage in sexual activity, this should be timed when the drug’s level in your body would be at its lowest, i.e. you would take your daily dose after sexual intercourse.
There are some case reports and small clinical studies that have found some additional medications can modify the effect of the antidepressant. For example, in an off-label test, Amantadine has been shown to relieve the SSRI-induced inability to reach an orgasm in some but not all people.
All this has assumed that the ED was in fact caused by the depression or the medication to treat that depression. If there are alternative explanations for the ED, those should also be thoroughly investigated. It would compound the irony if the true cause of your ED should prove not to be the antidepressants but a condition requiring a different treatment.