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Dr. Giraldi explains if there are pharmaceuticals available to treat female desire problems.
Dr. Giraldi:
We don’t have any common solutions because in the States there are no approved solutions and I think we have to be aware of that if anything used is off label. In Europe we have a testosterone patch for women who have a surgical menopause, meaning they have had their ovaries removed and then they have a decrease in desire.
So we don’t have anything that’s really a hit saying this is just the solution that we can give. We have a lot of things that we think we can use and I think one of the main agents we have used is testosterone – the male hormone, and all women also have some male hormones in them and we know that there is a decline in testosterone when women get older. So women passing the menopause have, a lot of women have had effect of having a little bit of testosterone because they have low desire.
That’s one way you can go, then we tried the, all the Viagra agents and they work in the way that they get more blood to the genitals and they do the same in women but the problem is that women don’t see that as an increase in their sexual capacity because most of the women’s sexuality is in the brain and they don’t work in the brain, but still I think some women might benefit from these. If they have a specific problem like diabetes then they have a lubrication problem.
Then we have a whole new area of agents that are under development in the pharmaceutical industry and they are, all of them are acting on the brain because during the last year we have learned that if you want some kind of influence to women’s sexuality you have to go through the brain because that’s where the sexuality is.
So the way it is now is that we have hormones, meaning estrogens combined with testosterone, that’s the only thing we have, and it’s only a small part of the treatment because it’s only for a certain group of women. It’s not a lot of women who can use that.
About Dr. Giraldi, M.D., Ph.D.:
Dr. Annamaria Giraldi, M.D., Ph.D., specializes in female sexual dysfunction. Her research interests include the connection between diseases and female sexual function, and the treatment of sexual desire problems in women.
Dr. Giraldi is associate editor for The Journal of Sexual Medicine. She is a member of the European Society for Sexual Medicine and the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health.