CANCER DIGEST – March 10, 2016 – The active ingredient in Viagra® can stimulate the growth of existing skin tumors, laboratory and animal studies show. Sildenafil is the ingredient used to treat erectile dysfunction and is the active ingredient in a number of other drugs, which have been on the market since the late 1990s.
Researchers have long debated a possible link between sildenafil and cancer. A long-term study of some 15,000 men in the United States published in 2014 suggested that sildenafil was connected to a higher risk of malignant melanoma.
That correlation was confirmed in 2015 by another study of around 24,000 men in Sweden. Yet neither study was able to say whether the increased melanoma risk is in fact due to a biological effect of the drug on tumor cells.
Researchers led by Professor Robert Feil and his working group at the University of Tübingen's, Germany looked at the effects of sildenafil on cellular processes in mice and in human cells.
They found that sildenafil appears to stimulate a molecule active in many metabolic processes involved in blood vessel, heart, neuron and sensory cell growth. Sildenafil appears to block an enzyme that acts as a brake on the molecule, which in turn promotes the growth of existing malignant melanomas. The results of the study are published in the latest edition of Cell Reports.
Professor Feil emphasizes that even given these early results, there is no reason for men to refrain from occasionally taking silenafil to treat erectile dysfunction. He says further studies are necessary to gauge the applicability of the findings to humans.
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