Posted 10/7/2011 8:19 PM (GMT 0)
Saw the below article today.
The AP (10/7) reports, "The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday that it has approved Eli Lilly and Co.'s erectile dysfunction drug Cialis [tadalafil] to be used in treating symptoms tied to a condition that leads to an enlarged prostate." Those symptoms include difficulty in urinating and more frequent urination.
The Los Angeles Times (10/7, Healy) reports in its "Booster Shots" blog that the "affliction...affects more than half of all men older than 60" and is called "benign prostatic hyperplasia [BPH], or enlarged prostate." The blog also points out that "if severe symptoms are untreated, a man can develop urinary tract infections, bladder stones, and damage to the bladder and kidneys."
HealthDay (10/7) cites the National Institutes of Health saying that "more than half of men in their 60s, and as many as 90 percent in their 70s and 80s, have some symptoms of BPH." It adds that the "approval was made on the basis of three studies," two of which "found that men who took the 5-milligram dose of Cialis one per day experienced an improvement in BPH symptoms vs. men who took a dummy pill," while the third showed improvement for "both impotence and enlarged prostate." The FDA also issued a warning that tadalafil "should not be used in patients taking nitrates, for example nitroglycerin, because the combination can cause an unsafe decrease in blood pressure."
Medscape (10/7, Lowes) reports that the FDA also "does not recommend combining tadalafil with alpha-blockers for the treatment of BPH because the combo therapy has not been adequately studied, and it comes with a risk of lowering blood pressure." MedPage Today (10/7, Gever) reports, "Tadalafil is the first phosphodiesterase-5 inhibitor to be approved for BPH. Eight other drugs are currently available for the condition, all of which are either alpha-adrenergic blockers or 5-alpha-reductase inhibitors." Reuters (10/7, Yukhananov) and WebMD (10/7, DeNoon) also covered the approval.