For years, Viagra has helped our nation’s grandfathers and old men get and maintain boners well into their golden years. Now, it might help them with Alzheimer’s, too.
According to new research from the Genomic Medicine Institute at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, there’s a significant association between having a Viagra (or generic sildenafil) prescription and avoiding Alzheimer’s. This is true even when you account for other factors that influence Alzheimer’s, like age, race and comorbidities such as high blood pressure and diabetes.
The big questions are why the hell this correlation exists, and how researchers discovered it in the first place. As you may know, Alzheimer’s is one of those difficult illnesses for which we have no real treatment or preventative measures. The leading form of dementia, it currently impacts six million Americans and is predicted to impact 13.8 million by 2050 (typically, symptoms of Alzheimer’s begin when a person is in their late 60s). Meanwhile, developing effective treatments and medicines for diseases that impact the brain can be costly and challenging. So, at least for now, researchers’ best bet is to try and see which existing drugs can be repurposed for Alzheimer’s.
Researchers analyzed insurance claims data for 7.23 million individuals, specifically looking at 1,600 different drugs that were known to interact with networks in the brain related to Alzheimer’s. After narrowing it down to 66 drugs that fit the bill, they noticed that those who were prescribed sildenafil had a 69 percent (nice) reduced risk of developing Alzheimer’s over the next six years.
To make sure this correlation wasn’t just a random coincidence, researchers tested Viagra in a lab setting on nerve cells that came from people with Alzheimer’s. As it turns out, the drug promoted the growth of new nerve fibers and decreased the accumulation of tau — a biomarker often used to track the progression of the disease in animals and humans — on the cells.
Because the study only utilized insurance data, and Viagra is only prescribed to people with dicks, it’s unclear whether this decrease in Alzheimer’s risk would also apply to cis women or anyone without a penis. There will also need to be more large-scale studies that explicitly examine the effects of Viagra on Alzheimer’s risk on men in order to more concretely prove the correlation.
But for now, it’s a pretty promising development. Which, frankly, perfectly fits with the Viagra story. It was originally developed as a hypertension drug, and it just turned out that it was super effective at producing boners. Now, its latest unexpected trick seems to be how super effective it is at preventing Alzheimer’s.
Magdalene Taylor
Magdalene Taylor is a staff writer at MEL. She covers internet culture, sex and the online adult industry. She lives in Brooklyn but is from God's Country, Western Massachusetts.
