The next female Viagra may not be a drug
Female sexuality has been ignored for much of history , and that also shows in the scientific progress that has been made on the subject. A paradigmatic case is that of sexual enhancers: there is not yet a version of Viagra for women that can be compared to its male counterpart in terms of efficacy and lightness of side effects.
However, this could be changing now, with the appearance on stage of an alternative that consists of a type of intervention not based on drugs and that acts directly on the brain.
The fiasco of Addyi
Not so long ago that the pill that was unofficially called "female Viagra" began to be commercialized.
Its real name is Addyi, and although the press spread its properties with enthusiasm, it did not take long to be very ineffective when it came to increasing sexual desire, and it has also been seen that its side effects are too intense to consider this product a hopeful alternative.
These disappointing results have meant that many researchers have decided to tackle the problem from scratch, without taking too many things for granted. One of the methods of sexual enhancement for women that is being tested and that offers more promising results is, for example, a tool that is not even based on the release of an active ingredient through pills. In this case, the key is to stimulate parts of the brain by signals that act through the scalp and the bones of the skull.
Viagra for women, acting directly on the brain
This promising tool has two different variants, although both are based on the use of electric shocks on parts of the brain related to the experimentation of pleasure and the reward system, all without surgery.
An occasional help to feel more desire
One of these two tools is called Direct Current Stimulation (DCS) and consists of placing a device on the head, which sends a diffuse electrical signal for about 20 minutes over strategically chosen areas of the brain.
This stimulation does not serve by itself to experience greater sexual desire; its function is to make a greater variety of stimuli collected by the senses be appreciated as sexually suggestive . That is, the DCS serves to predispose.
An option to increase libido in women permanently
The second option that is working to intervene in the lack of sexual desire in women is called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS). This is a tool that began being studied basically as a resource to treat depression resistant to therapies (being effective in such problems). Basically, the TMS involves the creation of a magnetic field around the head by which areas of the brain are stimulated that are related to the reward system. All this, without pain.
Specifically, it enhances the activity of those brain regions that react to pleasure and in general, that which is perceived as a reward (and which we therefore want to repeat). It is precisely these areas that show less activity than normal in women who notice that they perceive a problem in their lack of sexual desire.
In this way, TMS allows those areas of the brain that remain in an unusually low activation state in women with a lack of sexual desire to become activated as they do in most people, but without crossing that threshold. That is, there would be no risk of going over and generating the opposite problem.
The results obtained through the use of this technique are very promising. Through an experiment whose results have been published in PLoS ONE and in which 20 men and women participated, it was found that the TMS caused the activation patterns of the parts of the brain that mediate the appearance of pleasure to be significantly more intense.
Stimulate the brain, but without drugs
Both methods of brain stimulation have many advantages. Unlike treatment with drugs, they go to the root of the problem without going through the metabolism of substances circulating in the blood, and therefore their side effects should be much lower.
Further, these two options in development pose different approaches . The TMS is used with the aim of introducing long-term changes in the functioning of the brain after going through a series of sessions in the clinic, while the DCS proposes an instantaneous solution whose effects only last a few minutes, just as the Conventional Viagra
Of course, there will always be a debate about whether the lack of sexual desire is in itself a clinical problem or not; It may be that the problem is not of the person.However, that discussion can not overshadow the fact that developing solutions for those women who want to increase their sexual desire is beneficial.
