"Viagra and Cancer"
Of the half dozen Viagra-type drugs on the market now,
Viagra itself may still have the greatest efficacy
but also has the highest rate of overall side effects.
It's still a pretty safe drug.
Some guy swallowed 65 at a time
in hopes he’d go out with a bang,
but it didn’t work.
The most commonly observed acute side effects
include headache, flushing, stomach upset,
runny nose, and vision abnormalities,
but now that it’s been around for a decade,
some chronic effects may be cropping up.
For example, glaucoma,
one of the leading causes of blindness,
caused by degeneration of the optic nerve.
Up to nearly 10 times the odds of glaucoma
among those using Viagra long-term.
But, it’s cancer that has the medical community
rethinking the safety of these kinds of drugs.
Men with advanced prostate cancer
often have to get a radical prostatectomy,
a surgery that can leave them both incontinent and impotent,
which can reduce their quality of life.
Therefore, a treatment concept called
“penile rehabilitation” was introduced,
where drugs like Viagra are given to counteract
the side effects of the surgery.
But, there have been studies like this,
that found Viagra could decrease natural killer cell activity,
and natural killer cells are our first line
of immune defense against cancer.
Now, this was a study on women for something else,
but it did raise concerns about
giving Viagra to those battling prostate cancer.
In terms of getting prostate cancer in the first place,
men treated with Viagra-type drugs
tended to have less of a chance
of being diagnosed with prostate cancer;
yeah, but that may just be because
they’re ejaculating more.
Higher ejaculation frequency may be associated
with a lower risk of prostate cancer.
It's interesting the reason they think why.
Frequent ejaculations may decrease the concentration
within the prostate gland itself of xenobiotic compounds,
like hormone disrupting chemicals and carcinogens.
Anything we eat can end up in our prostate.
Drink a cup of coffee, and you end up with
caffeinated semen 10 hours later.
Smoke a cigarette, and the nicotine ends up in the same place.
Or eat fish, and end up with
one-seventh the healthy sperm count,
perhaps because there’s like three times
the concentration of PCBs.
But, anyway, you don’t know for sure about Viagra,
until you put it to the test.
Nearly 5,000 prostate cancer survivors were followed,
and those taking Viagra-type drugs
did seem to have a little bump
in their risk of the cancer coming back,
but subsequent studies failed to find such an association.
What moved me to make this video is the unexpected connection
between Viagra and melanoma skin cancer.
If treated early, melanoma can be cured by cutting it out,
but due to its proclivity to metastasize,
in about 20% of patients, it progresses to an
aggressive invasive disease
that can kill in a matter of months.
And, part of the way it does this
is through a gene mutation in the cancer,
that induces melanoma cell invasion
by downregulating an enzyme called phosphodiesterase 5.
Does that word look familiar?
That’s what Viagra does.
Viagra works because it’s a phosphodiesterase 5 inhibitor.
So, Viagra may have the same effect
in terms of promoting melanoma growth.
You don’t know, though...
until you put it to the test.
And, Viagra use was associated with an 84% increased risk
of subsequent melanoma diagnosis,
and you put all the studies together,
and the association remains significant.
So, here we have this class of drugs
found in medicine cabinets across the country,
and the FDA does its best trying to ensure
the safety and efficacy of such drugs,
but you can’t always anticipate the molecular consequences
of inhibiting major cellular pathways.
There is, however, an alternative explanation.
Maybe users of Viagra are just naked more,
thus giving their partners the opportunity
to notice some suspicious mole or something,
as only about 1 in 3 melanomas are discovered
by the patients themselves.