Men's Health News
Older men who take drugs for erectile dysfunction may be at an increased risk of having a sexually transmitted disease, according to a new study in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Researchers found that men over the age of 40 who take meds like Viagra, Levitra and Cialis may be three times more likely to have an STD than men who don’t request a prescription.
These men may be more likely to practice unsafe sex or have more partners, says the lead study author Anupam Jena, Ph.D., M.D.
Although people in their late teens or early adulthood are more likely to have STDs—including Chlamydia and gonorrhea—the rates of these diseases have been growing in the elderly over the past decade, according to previous research.
“[One theory we had was that] the introduction of erectile dysfunction drugs were leading to higher rates of STDs among older folks,” says Jena. “If a drug comes out that allows men to have sex—when they formerly couldn’t, or had difficulty doing so—there would be a higher rate of STDs, just by virtue of having more sex.”
With this in mind, Jena and his colleagues examined the data from 44 large insurance companies for more than 1.4 million older men and found that nearly 40,000 of them had filled at least one prescription for an ED drug. Then the scientists compared how common STDs were in people who were using the meds and those who weren’t.
Sure enough, men who used ED drugs had an increased risk of STDs. But then the researchers looked at whether or not the men reported having an STD one year before compared to one year after filling their ED prescription.
Surprisingly, Jena found that the men who used these drugs were just as likely to have an STD before they filled their first prescription as they were after they received the medicine.
“That tells us that people who are using erectile dysfunction drugs are not necessarily unable to have sex,” says Jena. “By virtue of having an STD before they even filled their first scrip, we know they are having sex… A lot of people are [using the meds] because they want to increase their sexual pleasure.”
Jena says that while people over the age of 40 are indeed having less sex than younger people, they may be likely to have unsafe sex. That’s because the chances of becoming pregnant aren’t as high, and there’s less of a need to use condoms.
And because there is little risk of pregnancy, many doctors don’t warn their older patients about avoiding STDs, says Jena. But he’s hoping that his study will change this.
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