Sex, Drugs, and Women's Desire

It happened gradually when Barbara Gattuso was in her mid- to late-thirties. She was married and had three kids, the youngest of whom was a toddler. Her husband Greg was wonderful, and their marriage was going great. But she slowly lost her desire to have sex with him.To get more news about where to buy vigrx plus, you can visit vigrxplus-original.com official website.

It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy sex once it was happening. “When you’re in the act, you have desire. You like it when it’s being done,” she says. But beforehand, she felt no desire to have sex. This caused her “terrible stress.” She’d get up earlier in the morning than her husband, go to bed later, or pretend to be asleep just to avoid the possibility. “It was awful,” she says. “A horrible, horrible deception in a marriage.”

She talked to gynecologists, and none of them knew what to do. “If you find something, please let us know,” she says they told her. She called a “couple PhDs” who “claimed to be in sexual medicine.” When she explained her problem, she says they hung up on her. So she didn’t try sex therapy. She tried some over-the-counter remedies—nothing helped.
Barbara’s situation lasted for over 20 years. She never told Greg about it. One day in 2011, she saw a notice somewhere—on TV or in something she read, she doesn’t remember—of a clinical trial for a drug called flibanserin. “I was really excited,” she says.

Flibanserin was not yet approved, and it worked by altering levels of the neurotransmitters dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin. It was originally proposed as an antidepressant, first described in a 1997 paper, but it wasn’t found to be effective at treating depression in any of its nine Phase II trials. Many antidepressants carry a side effect of lower libido, and the later Phase II trials for flibanserin measured sexual dysfunction with an assessment that included the question, “How strong is your sex drive?” Women on flibanserin had higher sex drives than women on a comparable antidepressant, and, to the researchers’ surprise, higher sex drives than those on the placebo. So the Germany-based pharmaceutical company that owned flibanserin, Boehringer Ingelheim, began developing it as a drug to treat low desire.

Barbara hoped flibanserin would work to increase her desire or maybe as an antidepressant—either way, she could use it. “My dad was really ill at that time, and we lost our home in a fire. All this happened in six months.” She thought, “I have nothing to lose.”

Soon, Barbara was talking about her sex life in front of a couple hundred strangers. In a gray blazer with her blonde hair swept up, she looked determined and controlled sitting at the front of the FDA conference room in White Oak, Maryland. Other patients and their representatives clustered at circular tables in front. They were all there for the FDA’s patient-focused drug development public meeting on female sexual dysfunction.

Low desire has historically been considered a psychiatric condition, which means its diagnosis is defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM. When a group of experts met in 2000 to discuss updating the definition of female sexual dysfunction, “95 percent of them had financial relationships with the drug companies hoping to develop drugs for the very same condition,” wrote Ray Moynihan in his book Sex, Lies and Pharmaceuticals .