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The Quest for a Prosexual Medication for Women

  • Current Controversies (P Kleinplatz and C Moser, Section Editors)
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Abstract

The recent failure of the professional and lay public to quickly widely adopt the newly approved prosexual drug for young women with acquired Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD) stimulated this review focusing on the obstacles facing any candidate drug for women’s desire deficiencies. Because sexual desire is relational and contextual, it is inappropriate to compare prosexual drugs for women with the PDE-5i medications for men. Underlying the uncertainties about the best outcome measures to be used in prosexual women’s studies are four basic questions. Are all young women’s desire problems to be considered a disorder? Which of them, if any, represent a serious medical disorder? Does the source of a woman’s distress actually matter to the diagnosis and treatment of her circumstances? Are subjects included in the HSDD clinical trials representative of those in the community with acquired HSDD or Sexual Interest/Arousal Disorder (SIAD)? Advocates for the approval of future candidate agents, who are likely to greatly benefit financially from their drug’s clinical benefit, might consider discussing both the strengths and the limitations of their safety and efficacy findings. The controversies that occurred before and after the approval of flibanserin are better respected rather than dismissed as obstructionist.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Marital and Sexual Health, Beachwood, OH, 44122, USA

    Stephen B. Levine, Denise L. Sheridan & Erin B. Cooper

Authors
  1. Stephen B. Levine
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  2. Denise L. Sheridan
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  3. Erin B. Cooper
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Stephen B. Levine.

Ethics declarations

All reported studies/experiments with human or animal subjects performed by the authors have been previously published and were in compliance with all applicable ethical standards (including the Helsinki Declaration and its amendments, institutional/national research committee standards, and international/national/institutional guidelines).

Conflicts of Interest

SBL and DLS have been conducting male and female prosexual drug research sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry for 20 years. They were a site investigator team for one of the flibanserin trials. EBC has written an editorial about flibanserin but has not been an investigator.

Human and Animal Rights and Informed Consent

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Current Controversies

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Levine, S.B., Sheridan, D.L. & Cooper, E.B. The Quest for a Prosexual Medication for Women. Curr Sex Health Rep 8, 129–135 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11930-016-0085-y

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