SAN DIEGO - Some are calling it the new Viagra for women. Alvarado Hospital's Dr. Irwin Goldstein, Director of Sexual Medicine and Editor-In-Chief of The Journal of Sexual Medicine serves as the lead consultant for a new drug that could potentially become the first FDA-approved drug to treat women who suffer from sexual dysfunction.
Women have long found scant help when it comes to medical treatment of sexual dysfunction, an amorphous diagnosis that can encompass a languid libido, lack of sexual fantasies, pain during intercourse and the stress created by such problems.
Men have benefited for more than a decade from Viagra and its cousin drugs, which generated nearly $1.8 billion in sales last year in the United States.
Women may soon get their own prescription-strength sexual aid with flibanserin, a medication originally intended to treat depression but now poised for review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a sex enhancer.
Flibanserin "has enormous potential to be a life-changing sort of product," said Goldstein, a urologist who helped Pfizer develop Viagra in the 1990s. "You have to sit in my office and listen to the legions of women who say, 'I'm not who I once was.' "
Supporters of the drug envision it eventually paving the way for a stream of therapies whose impact would extend beyond medicine. They see a change in thinking that could rival the cultural changes brought by birth control pills or the transformation for aging men made possible by erectile dysfunction medications.
Goldstein said his practice in San Diego will take part in new rounds of clinical studies gauging flibanserin's effects on post-menopausal women and men. Those trials are slated to start early next year.
