Has a name brand prescription medication ever shot to notoriety as quickly as Viagra did? Within a few months of its arrival on the market, it seems like everyone knew about the little blue pill, whether through commercials featuring celebrity spokespeople or from endless jokes on late night talk shows. But while everyone understood that this medication promised to treat erectile dysfunction, what most people didn’t know was the wild story leading to its development. Or how this medication (and similar medications) actually works. Or the tremendous impact this blockbuster drug would have on the ways that medications are advertised and developed. In this episode, we bring you those stories (and many more).
| History | Biology |
| Loe, Meika. “The rise of Viagra: How the little blue pill changed sex in America.” The Rise of Viagra. New York University Press, 2004. | Dean RC, Lue TF., 2005. Physiology of penile erection and pathophysiology of erectile dysfunction. Urol Clin North Am. Nov;32(4):379-95 |
| Armstrong, Katrina, J. Sanford Schwartz, and David A. Asch. “Direct sale of sildenafil (Viagra) to consumers over the Internet.” New England Journal of Medicine 341.18 (1999): 1389-1392. | Gratzke, C., Angulo, J., Chitaley, K., Dai, Y.T., Kim, N.N., Paick, J.S., Simonsen, U., Ückert, S., Wespes, E., Andersson, K.E. and Lue, T.F., 2010. Anatomy, physiology, and pathophysiology of erectile dysfunction. The journal of sexual medicine, 7, pp.445-475. |
| Brindley, G. S. “Cavernosal alpha-blockade: a new technique for investigating and treating erectile impotence.” The British Journal of Psychiatry 143.4 (1983): 332-337. | Andersson, K.E., 2011. Mechanisms of penile erection and basis for pharmacological treatment of erectile dysfunction. Pharmacological reviews, 63(4), pp.811-859. |
| Caplan, Arthur. “Ethical implications of drugs for erectile dysfunction.” AMA Journal of Ethics 16.11 (2014): 928-931. | Giuliano, F. and Rampin, O., 2004. Neural control of erection. Physiology & behavior, 83(2), pp.189-201. |
| Chen, A. “Covering Viagra, But Not Birth Control?” Jstor Daily. (2016) | Andersson, K.E., 2001. Pharmacology of penile erection. Pharmacological reviews, 53(3), pp.417-450. |
| Dunzendorfer, Udo, ed. Sildenafil. Springer Science & Business Media, 2004. | Sharmin, S., Biswas, K. and Nandi, T., 2022. Sildenafil (Viagra®): a pharmacokinetic (PK) review. Journal of Advances in Medicine and Medical Research, pp.300-315. |
| Tone, Andrea, and Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, eds. Medicating modern America: prescription drugs in history. NYU Press, 2007. | Patel, D.P., Pastuszak, A.W. and Hotaling, J.M., 2019. Emerging treatments for erectile dysfunction: a review of novel, non-surgical options. Current Urology Reports, 20, pp.1-7. |
| Ghofrani, Hossein A., Ian H. Osterloh, and Friedrich Grimminger. “Sildenafil: from angina to erectile dysfunction to pulmonary hypertension and beyond.” Nature reviews Drug discovery 5.8 (2006): 689-702. | Raheem, O.A., Natale, C., Dick, B., Reddy, A.G., Yousif, A., Khera, M. and Baum, N., 2021. Novel treatments of erectile dysfunction: review of the current literature. Sexual Medicine Reviews, 9(1), pp.123-132. |
| Goldstein, Irwin, et al. “The serendipitous story of sildenafil: an unexpected oral therapy for erectile dysfunction.” Sexual medicine reviews 7.1 (2019): 115-128. | Li, Z., Lv, X., Liu, Q., Dang, D. and Wu, H., 2021. Update on the use of sildenafil in neonatal pulmonary hypertension: a narrative review of the history, current administration, and future directions. Translational Pediatrics, 10(4), p.998. |
| Harrold, Leslie R., et al. “The diffusion of a novel therapy into clinical practice: the case of sildenafil.” Archives of internal medicine 160.22 (2000): 3401-3405. | Karunarathna, I., De Alvis, K., Gunasena, P. and Jayawardana, A., 2024. The impact of sildenafil on quality of life: Evidence from clinical studies. |
| Klotz, Laurence. “How (not) to communicate new scientific information: a memoir of the famous Brindley lecture.” Trends in Urology & Men’s Health 3.6 (2012): 35-36. | |
| Marshall, Barbara L. “Hard science’: Gendered constructions of sexual dysfunction in theViagra Age’.” Sexualities 5.2 (2002): 131-158. | |
| Segal, Judy Z. “The rhetoric of female sexual dysfunction: faux feminism and the FDA.” CMAJ 187.12 (2015): 915-916. |
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One thought on “Episode 167 Viagra/Sildenafil: Raising the bar”
When viagra came out, my dad, a nurse, was given a promotional pen by a drug rep. It was… girthier than a normal pen, and also (Caucasian) flesh-toned. Subtle!