THE HERALD SUN

Troops warned against using too much viagra

AUSTRALIAN soldiers who are entitled to taxpayer-funded Viagra pills have been warned about the dangers of erectile dysfunction drugs and told they can have just four tablets a month.

Defence personnel, including those on active duty in places such as Afghanistan, have also been informed they must be medically assessed as suffering from sexual performance problems before the pills will be prescribed to them.

The Defence surgeon-general has issued a health bulletin in response to concerns about the possible over-use and over-prescribing of the drugs by military personnel.

The warning applies to Viagra and Cialis medication and states that a proper diagnosis of erectile dysfunction must be made before troops can qualify for the drugs.

Service personnel deployed overseas, who qualify to receive the drugs, continue to obtain them on deployment.

Defence said higher doses were available if prescribed by a medical officer.

It said it had no idea how many defence members were using Viagra or Cialis and it confirmed the drugs were available to anyone who needed them, including soldiers at war.

Four brand name 50mg Viagra tablets sell for $115.95 on the internet and four 10mg Cialis tablets cost the same.

Generic Viagra can be purchased for $1.95 a tablet and blackmarket pills for even less.

READ MORE

From Popular Science

Birth Control Pills Shown to Alter Structure of Women's Brains

You aren't yourself anymore. It's a familiar complaint heard by women who have recently gone on birth control pills. Now studies are providing evidence for what many of those women, and the men who love them, have long known intuitively: the pill can alter the female brain, making a woman act like a different person.

The pill turned 50 this year, and it has gone through many iterations since the Food and Drug Administration gave the pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle a green light to market the first oral contraceptive on June 23, 1960. Drug companies continually roll out contraceptives containing lower doses of hormones and entailing fewer side effects. But women who have gone on hormones can point to the effects that have stubbornly endured: moodiness, depression, decreased libido. (This last one makes some birth control pills perversely effective. Not only do they protect you from pregnancy if you do have sex, they also zap your desire to have sex in the first place -- and turn you into an unstable mess, which may in turn zap your partner's interest in sex.) But believe it or not, we still know very little about the consequences of taking daily hormones on a woman's brain.

That is changing, say Craig H. Kinsley and Elizabeth A. Meyer in Scientific American. They point to a recent study in the journal Brain Research comparing the brains of women on birth control pills with brains of other women and men. When the study's authors examined high-resolution images of participants' brains, they found the women on hormones showed more matter in some areas of the brain, including the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with cognitive activities like decision-making.

The Brain Research study prompted breathless news reports suggesting that the pill makes you smarter. But Kinsley and Meyer point out that the brain works like a "neural beehive," and disturbing one part of the hive could impact the other. The fact that one brain region becomes larger than the next does not mean a woman on hormones is more intelligent or effective. It is also possible that her brain is going haywire. (Kinsley and Meyer actually use the word "catawampus.")

READ MORE