Why you should talk to your physician.
Years of practical experience have taught me, old physician, how reluctant men are to mention their sexual problems. But the increasingly clear data from research studies is that erectile dysfunction may be a symptom of undiagnosed cardiovascular disease.
So here’s the bad news. And you are going to get asked the question by any physician who keeps up-to-date with best practice. ED can have destructive effects on your relationship with your partner. That’s either your heart itself, or the blood vessels taking the blood round your body, or the pressure of the system. To continue the bad news, avoiding any trip to consult your physician and simply buying Viagra online, or Cialis or Levitra is potentially dangerous. You may be leaving a serious heart condition as a time bomb in your system.
Continuing the flow of good news: as part of the ageing process, the layer of cells lining the interior surface of all blood vessels, called the endothelial layer, decreases the production of nitric oxide. This is even more of a threat to long-term smokers because nicotine both directly affects the vascular endothelium and restricts the smooth-muscle contraction in the cavernosal body producing ED.
So, if that is all the bad news, the good news is that there are many ways to treat ED - successfully in most cases. Because of the choices of treatment, we can usually find combinations of treatment that are compatible (and, yes, this may be a choice between Viagra, Cialis and Levitra, or one of the other slightly more invasive medications or devices). In the past, some of the medications to reduce high blood pressure and to lower the level of lipids in your blood were incompabile with the treatments for ED. If we physicians are involved early enough, we can also help you to stop smoking and reduce your weight, both of which will give you many more years of active life.
In a study completed in 2002(1), 980 patients who reported ED were diagnosed as follows:
- 18% of patients had undiagnosed high blood pressure;
- 16% had diabetes;
- 4% had prostate cancer, and
- 1% had depression.
Just so we are absolutely clear, the main link between ED and cardiovascular disease is the vascular endothelium. If you have less nitric oxide, ED can be the first major symptom of what will become a more general endothelial cell dysfunction leading to cardiovascular disease or diabetes.
