Never take any medication without consulting your doctor or any professional. Some medicines can ultimately decline men’s sexual health. We listed the top five types of medications that cause ED.
- Cancer drugs
The infection rate of cancer continues to rise all over the world. Luckily, advancements in pharmacy have produced effective medicines.
These drugs are useful both to manage cancer cells and as a treatment regime in chemotherapy.
These medications further help to reduce pains associated with this disease. Yet, they bring other side effects. The most common reaction is the advancement of the erectile dysfunctions.
Drugs used to treat prostate, colon, and bladder cancers are particularly sensitive to sexual performance. And so are those medicines used for rectal cancer.
The ED may creep in progressively. But the cancer treatment drugs accelerates its side effects.
Sadly, the medicines also affect your physical and mental states. Yet these factors are vital for fulfilling sexuality.
So how do these tablets cause ED? Well, they prevent you from attaining or maintaining a firm erection. Other effects include difficulties reaching climax as well as weak orgasms.
Many of these prescriptions also leave you with less energy and zeal to take part in sex.
Also, OncoLink explains that while chemotherapy is not a direct cause of erectile dysfunction (ED), it can still affect one’s overall sexual health. Throughout the treatment process, there is a possibility of experiencing changes in sexual desire. Conversely, hormone therapy carries the potential risk of reducing libido, causing erectile dysfunction, and leading to difficulties in achieving orgasm.
- High blood pressure drugs
High blood pressure is a double-edged sword in your sex life. You need a reasonable moderate blood pressure to engage in sex. Yet, some men can’t sustain healthy blood pressure.
These males require lifestyle changes to achieve this. But not all men can meet the recommended blood pressure range with exercises alone.
So many revert to high-blood pressure pills to manage their symptoms.
The drugs are effective. But they also take you back to where you came from. The drugs ravage your erection functions. Thus they also contribute to the onset of new sets of ED.
To treat BP conditions, doctors prefer certain pressure drugs due to their effectiveness. These are those medicines in the diuretic class.
They include drugs such as hydrochlorothiazide. Yet they are also known to trigger ED symptoms.
Another popular blood pressure medication belongs to the beta-blocker category. Though these tablets work well to subdue your pressure, they also bring adverse ED side effects.
- Anti-anxiety medications
Many studies related to the causes of erectile dysfunction link this phenomenon to modern living.
A high-stress environment causes anxiety levels to spike. To treat these elevated anxieties, doctors usually prescribe antidepressants.
Sometimes the connection between anxiety and ED is psychological. You may exhibit signs of performance anxiety.
This is a condition forcing you to worry whether your member will rise to the occasion.
Unfortunately, worrying about sexual performance leads to a dismal sex show. You fail to concentrate on pleasuring your partner.
Instead, you become concerned about how long you will remain erect.
Sex performance aside, there are other triggers of anxiety. But anti-anxiety therapy is useful in calming down your stress levels. It also works to tame your frayed nerves.
While the treatment minimizes irritation symptoms, it also subdues your libido. Being on antidepressants could hence cause impotence.
The medications limit your sexual sensory system by numbing your sexual reflexes.
- Muscle relaxers
Some medical conditions cause muscles to stiffen or to spasm. Besides, specific jobs continually strain muscles excessively, leading to muscular pain and arches.
Injuries to the brain, spinal cord, and congenital paraplegias all result in motor disorders. Further, stroke, kidney failure, and diabetes also aggravate this condition.
Also, anemia and thyroid infections lead to such situations.
Extreme pain accompanies the ensuing muscular malfunctions. What’s more, this situation could result in improper mobility and the inability to perform some mobile functions.
So what is the way out? The solution is to look for muscle relaxants. These are medicines that help to relax the nerves. In so doing, they help to subdue involuntary spasm or prolonged vascular stiffness.
Drugs such as orphenadrine erase the nerve throb and rigidity. While such tablets are useful in restoring normal motor functions, they also cause erectile dysfunction.
According to a Consumer Reports post, specific medications like muscle relaxers (e.g., baclofen/Lioresal) and over-the-counter pain relievers (e.g., ibuprofen/Advil, Motrin) have been linked to a reduction in sexual desire in men. Furthermore, a study conducted in 2012, which included men between the ages of 45 and 69, revealed that individuals taking three to five medications had a 15 percent greater chance of experiencing erectile dysfunction compared to those taking two or fewer medications.
Tests show that these drugs prevent your penis from functioning well.
- Recreational drugs
The most disheartening cause of erectile dysfunction is recreational drug abuse. These include alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, and nicotine.
Drug abuse has far-reaching consequences. From traffic accidents to gun violence to emergency medical conditions, drugs continue to cost lives and money.
Thus mentioning that drugs cause erectile dysfunction doesn’t appear a bad outcome. But erectile dysfunctions emanating from drug misuse lead to family breakdown.
Thus drugs have a temporary high. But this isn’t how it consumes its users in the long run. It results in nerve atrophy and declining cognitive function.
One of the problems with drug misuse is that users become so reckless in their sex lives. Care-free attitudes lead them to indulge in risky sex.
Hence help in the spread of sexually transmitted infections. STIs further negate the proper functioning of sex organs.
Worse still, these diseases affect the victims psychologically. They lack the confidence to build long-lasting relationships.
And even when they try to stay in one, they can’t fulfill their conjugal duties effectively.
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- Parkinson’s Medications
Parkinson’s disease is a condition that hampers the proper functioning of the nervous system and gradually progresses to include muscular difficulties and disorientation.
Many patients suffering have tremors in their limbs, and can’t move coherently. Besides, they lack muscular flexibility. But the most noticeable sign is slurry speech and small handwriting.
But there is yet another sign of Parkinson’s disease that’s not very apparent. This happens in the bedroom.
Erectile Dysfunction is another effect arising from this condition. Once you contract Parkinson’s, it isn’t curable. Luckily, several medicines are available to manage this situation.
Drugs like Benzitropine, Carbidopa-Levodopa, Bromocripine, and Tribexyphenidyl manage different aspects of this illness. The ingredients in these tablets are absorbed through the nerve cells in the brain.
Once ingested, these substances convert to dopamine. The feel-good chemicals help to transmit neurons between the affected brain parts that control motor functions.
But these medicines also aggravate ED by triggering anxiety which causes decreasing sex drive.
- Anti-allergy drugs
Weather and pollen may cause allergic reactions. Your body fights off these symptoms through some reactions.
This reaction is via the release of a chemical called histamine. The chemical is triggered when your immune system senses the presence of a foreign infection, causing your body to change as a protective mechanism.
Histamine release, in turn, causes your blood vessels to expand and your skin to swell. You may also feel itchy and the need to cough, sneeze, or wheeze as a result.
When this happens, you feel uncomfortable. To prevent this reaction, you usually take antihistamine medication. They work by suppressing the production of these chemicals.
Antihistamines are drugs you take to manage seasonal flu and similar allergic conditions. They are usually easily obtainable since they don’t require a prescription.
So people take them as they wish. The most popular category include Diphenhydramine, Dimenhydrinate, and Hydroxyzine.
The tablets help to calm the unwanted consequences of histamines. But their side effect is erectile dysfunction.
In an article published by GoodRx Holdings, Inc., multiple studies have indicated a potential link between erectile dysfunction (ED) and certain anti-allergy medications, such as Dimenhydrinate (Dramamine), Diphenhydramine (Benadryl), Loratidine (Claritin), Ranitidine (Zantac), and Meclizine (Antivert). Furthermore, a specific study suggests that medication could be the cause of erectile dysfunction in approximately one out of every four affected individuals.
- Chemotherapy drugs
Chemotherapy is a medicinal treatment apt for the suppression of most cancers. These drugs thus have powerful chemicals that prevent fast-multiplying cells in your body.
The drugs are meant to kill cancerous cells that grow by damaging good ones. So these drugs target defective cells to prevent them from fast propagation and overwhelming the good ones.
There are many chemotherapy drugs, but they all work in the same principle of controlling cancer spread. Thus they stop these cells from spreading throughout the body.
Most of these drugs are used late in the progression of cancer, usually during the last stage of gestation of the ailment.
Chemotherapy drugs are effective in slowing the spread of cancer but have harmful side effects. They cause massive nerve damage.
Peripheral neuropathy is the medical condition of these drugs’ effect on the nerves. The medication doesn’t directly interfere with nerve function.
They are. however, known to affect nerve tissues, preventing sexual response.
- Hormonal medications
Hormone therapy works in family planning and boosting testosterone growth. Here, drugs and other interventions are used to distort the natural hormonal activities.
Hormonal treatment therefore may target certain hormones. Meaning that some useful hormones are instructed to grow faster to overcome the harmful effects of mutating cells.
In other ways also, the same principle is used to slow the multiplication of bad hormones that promote the spread of harmful and infected cells in the body.
Erectile function depends on the endocrine signal to stimulate arousal and preserve a penile erection.
Yet, hormonal drugs interfere with the efficient working of sexual hormones.
So this treatment causes disruptions and probably interferes with penile neuropath transmission. This prevents communication between the brain part responsible for arousal and the sex organ.
A study published in the PMC Journal concluded that elevated exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals such as estradiol reduces nitric oxide-mediated penis erection and prevents blood retention at the cavernosal area, worsening erectile dysfunction.
- Opiates
Opiates are used to camouflage the intense pain called by inflammation and other injuries. These powerful painkillers are collectively called Opiates.
They are quite effective in eliminating pain. They are also addictive, meaning that once you start using them, no other medication tends to calm your agony.
There are two categories of opiates. The weak ones such as codeine and dihydrocodeine and the strong ones like morphine, fentanyl, and pethidine.
Because of their risks, they are only prescribed by doctors. Still, stringent controls by FDA haven’t prevented drug addicts from accessing them.
Fentanyl is so rampantly used in the US that it has become a leading killer drug. But there are serious side effects impacting erection.
The drugs inhibit the coordination of the gonadal-pituitary-hypothalamus axis which is responsible for sexual arousal.
Due to this disharmony, testosterone production is negatively affected resulting in sexual dysfunction.
This opiate-induced sexual performance deficiency manifests in abnormal sexual desire, less arousal, and poor satisfaction.
