Pharmacy 24/7 - Viagra, Cialis, Levitra Online

By Michelle Fay Cortez

FOR men with diabetes, erectile dysfunction may mean more than a lack of intimacy. It can also foreshadow heart disease, including heart attacks, strokes and even death, two new studies show.

The conditions have similar features. Heart disease develops when blood flow to the cardiac muscle is choked off, often because of fatty-plaque buildup or clots in the arteries. Erectile dysfunction can occur when damage to blood vessels hinders the surge of blood needed to sustain an erection. Both are common with diabetes, when high levels of blood sugar course through the vessels and cause damage.

Now, researchers in Hong Kong and Italy have found impotence may develop up to three years before heart disease in some diabetics, and those who have it may be at twice the risk for the deadly cardiac complications. The findings will appear in the May 27 Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

The development of erectile dysfunction should alert both patients and health-care providers to the future risk of coronary heart disease, said senior author Peter Chun-Yip, associate professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, in a statement.

The study strongly suggests erectile dysfunction is a marker for heart disease and doctors should ask diabetics about it to identify those at high risk, the researchers said.

Chun-Yips team tracked 2,306 male diabetics with no evidence of heart disease for four years, including 26.7 percent with erectile dysfunction, or ED. For every 1,000 men, 19.7 with ED developed heart disease each year, including a heart attack, chest pain, heart surgery or death from cardiac complications, compared with 9.5 per 1,000 without it, the study found.

Men with ED had a 58 percent higher risk of developing heart disease even after other reasons including age and medication use were taken into account, the researchers said.

The second study tracked 291 men with diabetes and silent heart disease, where reduced blood flow to the heart had not yet caused any significant complications. Those with erectile dysfunction, about one-third of the patients at the start of the study, were twice as likely to have a heart attack, stroke or other cardiac complications, the study found.

Drugs like Pfizer Inc.s Lipitor cut the heart risks by a third, the study found. Medications for erectile dysfunction, such as Pfizers Viagra, Bayer AGs Levitra and Eli Lilly & Co.s Cialis, seemed to have some benefit, though the results werent definitive, the researchers said.

Men should know that ED is a true harbinger of atherosclerotic coronary heart disease, said Robert A. Kloner, professor at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, in a statement.

Kloner, who wrote an editorial that accompanied the research, said more study is needed on drugs like Viagra, which was originally developed as a medication for the heart before its impact on erectile dysfunction was found.

Research on these drugs has come full circle, he wrote. The time has come to study these agents systematically as potential therapies for the prevention of adverse cardiac events in patients with vascular risk factors, he concluded.

source:  http://www.yehey.com/news/Article.aspx?id=215401