Tag : sexual-dysfunction

When your doctor tells you to lose weight, it’s not because they care what you look like in a bathing suit. We used to think that fat was just energy stored against the future, and that someday there will be a famine so the skinny would starve and the chubby would inherit the earth.

But that famine never came. We now know that fat produces a variety of hormones, peptides, and enzymes that can have wide-ranging impact on your health. Overweight people have increased risk of diabetes, dementia, cancer, sexual dysfunction, heart disease and strokes. It costs Medicare 50% more every year to treat an obese American compared to one of normal weight. The problem is only 20% of Medicare patients are normal weight.

If we Americans lost our extra weight, most of the healthcare crisis would disappear right along with the pounds.

One of the common therapies used in prostate cancer are drugs that interfere with a man’s production of testosterone. While this does slow tumor growth, there is a downside.

With low testosterone men are at higher risk of forming blood clots in their legs, lungs and brain, not to mention sexual dysfunction, depression and chronic fatigue. As a consequence, many men end up taking anticoagulants to prevent those blood clots.

An interesting paper just published shows that men who use anticoagulants have significantly better survival from their cancers than men who do not need these drugs. This intriguing bit of data is causing researchers to take a look at the anticoagulants, such as warfarin and heparin, to see if they might have anti-cancer properties that have not previously been recognized.

Once more, studies designed to look at one thing, raise more intriguing new questions than they answer.