CINCINNATI (Liz Bonis) - If you know anything about the history of the "little pink pill" medication, it's called "Addy" as the marketed name.
The actual drug is called flibanserin. It took three tries to get workers at the Food and Drug Administration to approve it at all and ten years to even get it to market. In the mean time, guys got their little blue pill in Viagra and now have nearly two dozen other medications for male sexual problems on the market.
The sales for Addy-1 have been slow and now a new study released in the Journal of the American Medical Association raised real questions about how effective the medication really is and whether that benefit outweighs some potentially serious side effects. So Local 12 News talked to Dr. Lisa Larkin, who is with a team the UC Health Women's Center, to ask what she thinks about the meta analysis saying the benefits may not outweigh risks for women with what's called hypoactive sexual desire disorder, or HSDD. The side effects include low blood pressure, dizziness, sleepiness, headaches and nausea.
But Dr. Larkin said in the analysis study those side effects were magnified because the authors reviewed unpublished studies with doses not currently approved for use by the FDA. Her opinion: this might be a bias in the reviewers that the condition is a real diagnosis.
"For me I will tell you the side effect profile when you look at the data substantially different than many of the medications we have that aren't getting all of this scrutiny. Which is why I think there really is some politics involved," said Dr. Larkin.
When asked if by politics she meant a girl thing, Dr. Larkin said, "Yes, right. So this goes back to validating women's sexual health as a priority."
Now there was a lot of concern initially this would be over-prescribed, in ways that some say men's drugs for sexual dysfunction were, but that has not happened. Sales have likely been slow and the authors of the study said that's proof it doesn't work. Dr. Larkin said that's not true, more than half the patients she has treated have continued on the medications with good results.
