September 12th, 2007
The impotence pill Cialis appears to work even in men with spinal cord injuries, French researchers said on Monday.
Impotence often follows spinal cord injuries. Only about 25 percent of men with such injuries are capable of having sex, Dr. Francois Giuliano and colleagues at the Raymond Poincare Hospital in Garches, France said.
They found that Cialis tripled the number of times the men could have sex.
Their study, funded by Eli Lilly and Co, maker of tadalafil or Cialis, involved 197 men with an average age of 38 in France, Germany, Italy and Spain with spinal cord injuries.
After a one-month waiting period, in which no one got treatment, a questionnaire to assess sexual function found both groups had moderate erectile dysfunction, Giuliano’s team reported in the Archives of Neurology.
Then 142 men were assigned to the Cialis group and 44 got a placebo for a 12-week period, taking no more than one pill daily as needed before sexual activity.
After 4 months, men taking Cialis were successful nearly half the time they attempted intercourse, while men in the placebo group succeeded only 16.8 percent of the time.
Cialis and similar drugs work by increasing blood flow to the genitals.
The researchers said the Cialis study achieved success similar to that found in studies of Pfizer Inc.’s Viagra or sildenafil and Glaxosmithkline Plc’s Levitra or vardenafil, all of which improved erections in men with impotence after spinal cord injury.
August 4th, 2007
If you think people have sex for pleasure and for procreation, you’re right. They also have sex to get rid of a headache, to celebrate a special occasion, to get a promotion and to feel closer to God.
New research published in the August issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior has come up with a list of 237 reasons that motivate people to have sex.
Who knew?
Cindy Meston, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and the lead author of the paper, said most people assume there are a few simple reasons for having sex: “It feels good, you’re in love, or you want to have a child. We found that people are having sex for lots of other reasons.”
Knowing that, she said, could boost sex education, help devise more effective strategies for preventing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and lead to improved treatments for people with sexual problems.
“You need to know why people are having sex if you’re trying to put into place a safe-sex program,” Meston said. “If you assume people have sex because they’re in the heat of the moment, then [you tell them to] carry condoms. But if they’re doing it for revenge or because they want to enhance their social status, that will require a different strategy.”
Meston and co-author David Buss conducted their research in two stages. First, they asked a group of more than 400 students and volunteers to simply list “all the reasons you can think of why you, or someone you have known, has engaged in sexual intercourse in the past.” That produced 715 reasons. After deleting identical or very similar entries, the researchers were left with 237.
Some were “pretty shocking,” Meston said, such as “I wanted to give someone else a sexually transmitted disease.” She said she also was surprised that some people said they had sex because “I wanted to get closer to God.”
“Most of the literature shows that religious people have more sexual problems,” she said. “But several people endorsed the idea that religion and sexuality were actually closely linked.”
In the second stage of the research, they asked 1,500 other students to rate how important each of the 237 reasons was in their own sexual behavior.
The students were asked to indicate how frequently each reason had led them to engage in sexual intercourse in the past, on a scale from 1 for never to 5 for all the time. Those who had not had intercourse (27 percent of the women and 32 percent of the men) were asked to indicate the likelihood that each of the reasons would lead them to have sex in the future.
Men, women share reasons
Most of the students gave the usual reasons for having sex: “I was attracted to the person,” “It feels good” and, “I wanted to show my affection” were high on the lists of both men and women. Lesser priorities on both lists were reasons such as, “Someone offered me money to do it,” “I felt sorry for the person,” “I wanted to punish myself” and, “Because of a bet.”
Meston said she was somewhat surprised by the similarities between the genders. Men were more likely to endorse having sex for physical reasons (such as, “The person was too hot to resist”) and to boost their social status (”I wanted to brag to my friends about my conquests.”) But there was no difference in the emotional reasons, such as, “I wanted to express my love for the person.”
“The stereotype that men have sex for physical reasons and women have sex for love — our data didn’t really support that,” Meston said. “These young men and women were having sex for physical pleasure and also for emotional attachment, feeling connected to another person.”
Meston and Buss said their findings contradict the stereotype that women, more than men, use sex to obtain special favors. In their study, men were more likely to endorse reasons for having sex that involved utilitarian goals (”To get a favor from someone”).
Leonore Tiefer, a sex therapist and psychologist at New York University School of Medicine, said the findings did not really answer the question, “Why Humans Have Sex,” as the title of the paper asserts.
“It’s why Texas students say they have sex,” Tiefer said.
Nevertheless, she said, it’s “useful to discuss motives, as opposed to just counting.”
Meston acknowledged the limitation of her research and said she planned to look at other populations.