Side Effects of Sex

It’s Monday morning, it’s cold and the holidays are still too far away to be a reality for most of us.  Not a lot to be cheerful about?  Right!

Never fear, SRxA’s Word on Health is here to help start your week off right with some health news that may just bring a smile to your face.

While many people associate a healthy lifestyle with grueling workouts, strict dieting and general deprivation and misery  – this is a misconception.

According to Dr Joseph Mercola, an osteopathic physician, web entrepreneur and New York Times best selling author, healthy habits can be among the most rewarding.  Take sex. It counts as moderately intense exercise plus it boosts numerous aspects of both physical and mental health. As long as you’re engaging in safe-sex practices, increasing your sexual activity is a surefire strategy to better health!

Mercola suggests regular sex can reduce stress, bolster self-esteem and foster feelings of intimacy and bonding between partners.  Better still, a healthy sex life can result in a longer, healthier and, most would agree, more enjoyable life.

In case that’s not enough – here’s 10 more healthy side effects of sex:

1. Improved Immunity

People who have sex frequently have significantly higher levels of immunoglobulin A (IgA). IgA is part of the immune system that forms your body’s first line of defense. Its job is to fight off invading organisms at their entry points, reducing or even eliminating the need for activation of your body’s immune system. This may explain why people who have sex frequently also take fewer sick days.

2. Heart Health

According to one study, men who made love regularly (at least twice a week) are 45% less likely to develop heart disease than those who did so once a month or less.

Sexual activity not only provides many of the same benefits to your heart as exercise but also keeps levels of estrogen and testosterone in balance, which is important for heart health.

3. Lower Blood Pressure

Sexual activity, and specifically intercourse, is linked to better stress response and lower blood pressure.

4. It’s a Form of Exercise

Sex helps to boost your heart rate, burn calories and strengthen muscles, just like exercise. In fact, research recently revealed that sex burns about 4 calories a minute for men and 3 for women, making it (at times) a ‘significant’ form of exercise. It can even help you to maintain your flexibility and balance.

5. Pain Relief

Sexual activity releases pain-reducing hormones and has been found to help reduce or block back and leg pain, as well as pain from menstrual cramps, arthritis and headaches. One study even found that sexual activity can lead to partial or complete relief of headache in some migraine and cluster-headache patients.

6. Help to Reduce Risk of Prostate Cancer

Research has shown that men who ejaculate at least 21 times a month (during sex or masturbation) have a lower risk of prostate cancer.

7. Improve Sleep

After sex, the relaxation-inducing hormone prolactin is released, which may help you to nod off more quickly. The “love hormone” oxytocin, released during orgasm, also promotes sleep.

8. Stress Relief

Sex triggers your body to release it’s natural feel-good chemicals, helping to ease stress and boost pleasure, calm and self-esteem. Research also shows that those who have sexual intercourse responded better when subjected to stressful situations like speaking in public.

9. Boost Your Libido

The more often you have sex, the more likely you are to want to keep doing it. There’s a mental connection there but also a physical one, particularly for women. More frequent sex helps to increase vaginal lubrication, blood flow and elasticity, which in turn make sexual activity more enjoyable.

10. Improved Bladder Control in Women

Intercourse helps to strengthen pelvic floor muscles, which contract during orgasm. This can help women improve their bladder control and avoid incontinence.

Happy Monday!

NSAID’s in the News (again)

Let me start by saying, that despite spending the last 20-something years in or around the pharmaceutical industry, I don’t like taking pills. That said, I’m not particularly partial to pain either. So when my knees or back hurts or I’m doubled over with dysmenorrhea, like many other people, I’ll reach for the ibuprofen.

But that may be about to change. Results from a new, large international study of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), showed that high doses of them increase the risk of a major vascular event such as heart attack, stroke or death from cardiovascular disease by around a third.

In other words, for every 1,000 people with an average risk of heart disease who take high-dose ibuprofen for a year, about three extra would have an avoidable heart attack, of which one would be fatal, the researchers said.

This puts the heart risks of generic NSAIDs on a par with Vioxx – the painkiller that U.S. drugmaker Merck famously pulled from sale in 2004 because of links to heart risks.

The study team from Oxford University in the UK, gathered data, including on admissions to hospital, for cardiovascular or gastrointestinal disease, from all randomized trials that have previously tested NSAIDs.

This allowed them to pool results from 639 trials involving more than 300,000 people and re-analyze the data to establish the risks of NSAIDs in certain types of patients.

In contrast to the findings on ibuprofen and diclofenac, the study found that high doses of naproxen, another NSAID, did not appear to increase the risk of heart attacks. The researchers said this may be because naproxen also has protective effects that balance out any extra heart risks.

Researcher, Colin Baigent stressed that the risks are mainly relevant to people who suffer chronic pain, such as patients with arthritis who need to take high doses of for long periods. “A short course of lower dose tablets purchased without a prescription, for example, for a muscle sprain, is not likely to be hazardous,” he said.

He also warns patients not to make hasty decisions or change their treatment without consulting a doctor.

“For many arthritis patients, NSAIDs reduce joint pain and swelling effectively and help them to enjoy a reasonable quality of life,” he said. “We really must be careful about the way we present the risks of these drugs. They do have risks, but they also have benefits, and patients should be presented with all those bits of information and allowed to make choices for themselves.”

Donald Singer, a professor of clinical pharmacology and therapeutics at Warwick University, who was not involved in the study, said its findings “underscore a key point for patients and prescribers: powerful drugs may have serious harmful effects.”

In the meantime, I for one, will be revising my pain versus pill-popping habit, or switching to naproxen.

OMG! Smartphone Sex Risk for Teens

Teenagers and their phones!  As any parent or indeed observer of human life knows, the mobile phone has become the most important adolescent accessory.  Texting has even taken over from talking as their preferred form of communication. 72% of all teens and 88% of teen cell phone users text-message at least once a day.

And while they may not all rival world record texter, Fred Lidgren, who sent 566,607 text messages during a one month period, I know several who are not far behind. And for those of you still doing the math, yes that’s a staggering 18,887 texts per day or 787 per hour or 13 texts each minute. LOL!

Not only does smartphone use kill the art of conversation, it has a decidedly most sinister side-effect.  According to new research just presented at the American Public Health Association meeting, smartphone use among teens is associated with an increased likelihood of being solicited for sex and having sex with an internet-met partner.

According to a 2011 survey among almost two thousand Los Angeles high school students, young people with smartphones are one and a half times as likely to report being sexually active, almost two times as likely to have been approached online for sex, and more than twice as likely to engage in sex with an Internet-met partner compared with those who do not access the internet on their cell phones.

Additionally, those being solicited online for sex are also found to be engaging in unprotected sex. Five percent of the participants reported using the Internet to seek sex partners and 17% of the participants reported being approached online for sex by someone they did not know.

“We, parents, health educators, physicians, must recognize that cell phones are yet another new way for adolescents to meet sex partners,” said researcher Hailey Winetrobe, MPH. “Parents and school health professionals should talk to their teens about being safe in meeting people online and in using condoms to prevent sexually transmitted infections and unplanned pregnancies.”

While we’re not suggesting that parents take their teenagers cell phones away, maybe it’s time to put those smartphones to good use and create apps and websites for adolescent-targeted sexual health programs.

What do you think?

Spanx Takes a Spanking

Spanx has been in the news a lot lately. First, Forbes magazine announced that Sara Blakely, founder of the women’s slimming undergarments company, had joined the billionare’s club this year. At age 41, and having started her business at home with just $5,000, Blakely is now the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire.

Last month, Oscar winning actress Octavia Spencer, hit the headlines when she revealed, what she’d not been revealing!  Turns out, when she took home the SAG Award for Outstanding Actress in a Supporting Role for The Help, she’d been wearing three pairs of Spanx under her gown.

Now it seems the trend has spread from the red carpet to the green turf. This week, ConsumerReports.org warned of the dangers of teens in Spanx. The on-line watchdog reported the tale of a 15-year-old high school soccer player who was recently referred to her doctor because of numbness, tingling, and discomfort in her left thigh that had bothered her for a few weeks. The diagnosis: a compressed nerve in her pelvis. The likely cause: Spanx. While doctors have previously warned of the health dangers associated with skinny jeans, such as  fertility problems , bladder infections , and blood clots the doctor in question was surprised that a girl so young and fit would wear Spanx. It turns out that her entire team wears them under their soccer uniforms.

Body slimmers are the latest fad to hit the athletic fields. Sold in an assortment of bright colors, they appeal to teenage girls who play soccer, lacrosse, and softball. However, in an attempt to conceal their spandex, these girls are rolling down the waistline of their Spanx and unwittingly pressing a tight band of Lycra into their groins. The result: injuries normally associated with direct trauma or repetitive stretching and contraction of the groin muscles. The treatment: in this case, the doctor advised his patient to ditch the Spanx, and retire her skinny jeans. Not that Sara Blakely needs to worry, according to Forbes, her billion dollar business is set to at least double in size in the coming years.

A new approach to new drug approvals?

Few topics inspire more heated discussion among drug developers and pharmaceutical industry watchers than the regulation of new products.  For those unfamiliar with the debate, the two sides of the argument can be summarized as follows.

Industry veterans feel that excessively conservative regulators squelch innovation in a desire to cover their own behinds, while industry critics contend that regulators aren’t strict enough, and that pharmaceutical companies should be held to an even higher standard and warrant even greater supervision.

In the meantime, patients wonder why modern science hasn’t produced the medicines they so desperately need.

Now it seems there may be an answer that could satisfy everyone.  Susan Desmond-Hellmann, Chancellor of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and former Genentech executive, suggests turning drug approvals from a discrete yes or no variable into a continuous moving target.

The fundamental problem with the current system, Desmond-Hellmann observes, is that regulators have only two options, when in fact, it might make a lot more sense for them to have a range of choices. She proposes that agencies, such as the FDA, could approve a drug for limited use, or use with limited promotion, following the submission of initial acceptable evidence of safety and efficacy. Permission for broader use, and less restrictive promotion, could be given after additional data are obtained.

This solution appears to make sense on many levels. It acknowledges:

• the long time it takes to become familiar with a drug and learn some of it’s more subtle effects – good, as well as bad
• the importance of accelerating the time it takes to get potentially useful drugs into the hands of patients who might need them
• the technologies now available to track and assess the performance of new drugs

FDA Approval Process

One advantage of such a system would be the emphasis it would place on durable results, as full approval would likely require not just success in a clinical trial, but continued demonstration of success under “real world” conditions.  Such a requirement would almost certainly stimulate the development of integrated “health solutions,” a bundled assortment of patient- and physician-support programs accompanying the drug.

Although a graduated regulatory approval process would not be perfect; it is almost certainly a significant step in the right direction.

Patient and physician educational and adherence programs make sense, but many companies have been reluctant to invest in them.  In the context of an offering that would need to succeed in order for a drug to be fully approved, the incentives are considerably more apparent, and would almost certainly stimulate interest in companies striving to deliver the most effective patient support programs.

However, the big questions still remain.  Are regulators ready for such change? Is the Industry ready to take on the responsibility and cost of ensuring appropriate use of their products and long-term pharmacovigilance? Would patients and consumer watchdog organizations accept a tiered approach?

What do you think?  SRxA’s Word on Health would love to know.

Dangerous Doses

The use of pharmaceutical medications is an essential element of the American health care system. For many people these prescribed drugs help to treat acute illnesses and maintain control of chronic conditions. However, medication use can also result in side effects. These may occur when treatment goes beyond the desired effect such as a hemorrhage triggered by the use of anticoagulants like warfarin or heparin; or problems that occur in addition to the desired therapeutic effect i.e. the nausea, vomiting, fatigue and  hair loss associated with chemotherapy drugs used to treat cancer.

In other words, side effects can occur as a result of unintentional overdosing by the patient, medication errors such as incorrect prescribing and dosing and even when drugs are taken as directed.

Even so, SRxA’s Word on Health was shocked to read the latest News and Numbers from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

It seems the rates of medication-related adverse outcomes are increasing. More worrisome, this trend is likely to continue with the aging of the population, the growth in the number of comorbidities, and so called polypharmacy – when patients take multiple drugs, often way more than they need.

According to the report released last week, the number of people treated in U.S. hospitals for illnesses and injuries resulting from taking medicines jumped 52%  between 2004 and 2008.

They now estimate that each year close to 1.9 million Americans suffer either medication side effects or injuries caused by being given the wrong medicine or dosage.

The top 5 categories of medicines that resulted in people being treated and released from emergency departments were:

• unspecified medicines  
• pain killers
• antibiotics
• tranquilizers and antidepressants
• corticosteroids and other hormones

For patients admitted to the hospital, the top five categories causing side effects and injuries were: corticosteroids, painkillers, blood-thinners, drugs to treat cancer and immune system disorders and heart and blood pressure medicines.

More than half of hospitalized patients were age 65 or older, while only 3% were under age 18. Children and teenagers accounted for 22% of emergency cases.

The increase in medication side effects coupled with the ensuing massive drain of healthcare finances and manpower suggest to us that pharmaceutical companies need to dedicate more resources to ensure that both doctors and patients are educated about side effects and how to recognize, minimize and manage them.