Impotence more common in men who pop painkillers NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Aging men tend to take more painkillers and experience more sexual problems, but does that mean one causes the other? According to a new study that took a stab at the question, the link between impotence and pain meds remained even after ruling out age and several other diseases as possible explanations. Researchers found that regular users of drugs like aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, and Celebrex were 38 percent more likely to have erectile dysfunction than men who didn't take the so-called nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory painkillers. Acetaminophen is sold as Tylenol in the U.S., and ibuprofen often as Advil.
Such drugs are thought to block the hormones that govern men's erections, which might help explain the new findings, said study author Dr. Joseph Gleason, a urologist with Kaiser Permanente in Los Angeles. The new report appears in the Journal of Urology. Still, Gleason said his results don't prove popping painkillers causes impotence. It's possible that unknown factors may be at play, or that he and his colleagues didn't succeed in weeding out the influence of other diseases entirely. For instance, many men take a low dose of aspirin because they're at higher risk for heart attack, which in turn means their blood vessels aren't in top shape. And that can affect the penis as well. "We call the penis a thermometer for vascular disease," or problems related to the blood vessels, said Dr. Brant Inman, a urologist at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina, who didn't work on the new study Arteries in the penis are smaller than those that go to the heart, he added, and therefore may get blocked up to several years earlier. Narrow arteries obstruct the blood that normally makes the penis swell and become hard.