Well Viagra, after a long market domination, you may be finally facing a worthy rival in the market of men’s erectile enhancement and performance enhancement drugs.  A new drug that goes by the medical name of avanafil and the brand name of Stendra has just gained the approval of the Food and Drug Administration to be put up for commercial sale.

What edge could this new erectile dysfunction and sexual enhancement drug have over Viagra, Cialis and the other big names out there now? Well, the edge it has is supposedly that it is very fast acting. So a man who takes it doesn’t have to do that unsexy plan-ahead thing when he wants to have sex.

Right now, with most erectile dysfunction drugs, a man may have to wait anywhere from an hour or more in order to feel the effects of his erection-initiating drug in his body.  The new Stendra has some serious bragging rights in that clinical trials showed it took anywhere from 30 minutes to a staggering 15 minutes to start acting.

15 minutes is pretty darn impressive. That at least gives somewhat of the illusion of spontaneity and it also is just the righ amount of time for foreplay coincidentally.  The drug works by essentially the same mechanism that most other erectile drugs do in that it increases blood flow to the penile chambers that fill up and make the penis erect.

The excitement (no pun intended) around this particular drug is that it has shown a discrepancy in its ability to increase blood flow and tends to increase blood flow only in the nether regions, where it is actually needed rather than in the whole body which is one of the major concerns of most other ED drugs.

This means Stendra could result in fewer unwanted side effects and health hazards. Think we may have a blockbuster drug here folks – I may want to buy some of this company’s stock!  The company that makes it by the way is called Vivus.

Hey guys, Jill here to – as usual- offer you a woman’s perspective on guy’s issues. After all, couldn’t all men use a woman’s perspective once in a while? Feminine energy is good for the soul here and there, and since men and women do differ on many levels, it’s always healthy for us to explore your point of view and ways of living, and vice versa.

I wanted to talk to you about something that affects both men and women, but sometimes women may be better at managing it because we are more open to certain alternative therapies. This is the whole “feminine energy” thing that seems to still be more openly accepted by women because it is considered to be all “touchy feely”.

In other words, men with a lot of machismo may not be so quick to embrace this stuff, but it would be to their detriment not to at least consider it since stress levels can contribute greatly to causes of early death.

There are a few practices that will literally save your life if you experience frequent stress or anxiety. Stress really does age you. Look at yourself in a mirror after a really long stressful day. You can tell – it’s in your face – you look older and more tired. Your face looks more lined.

You may even experience an upset stomach.  A faster heart rate also goes with stress, which isn’t good for your health unless it is going fast because you’re exercising!

Some of the best ways to control these negative effects is to practice meditation, which is combined with proper breathing techniques. Also yoga is a practice that helps regulate stress and control breathing. Connecting your breath and body is extremely important to maintaining overall good health and a healthy heart and circulatory system.

Yoga and meditation give us something that is in valuable to our health and wellness – not to mention our peace of mind. They give us mindfulness. It’s a connection to our body that helps remind us when we’re going through stressful times to really concentrate on mitigating how our body responds to it – namely in our breath.

Slower, more controlled breathing leads to a reduction in anxiety as well as better blood oxygenation, which is carried to the heart and organs, supplying them with plentiful nutrients and the ability to work correctly and efficiently.  It helps your whole body run more smoothly.

Not coincidentally, those that practice yoga and meditation tend to also have less heart problems and generally are healthier people.  They also tend to have less struggles with depression, and even can control bodily functions like blood sugar more efficiently. It just gives you so much more control over your body.

It even makes you eat healthier because you’re so aware of what a powerful vessel your body is.  By the way, there is a great DVD called “Yoga for Guys” you may want to check out if you want yoga that is geared for men and how men think and want to do things.

When we think of testosterone, we mainly think of a hormone that is given for men who want to increase their sexual capabilities or men who may supplement it (legaly or illegally depending on whether they compete in professional sports of some sort where doping is not allowed).

We don’t typically think that this predominantly male hormone would have any other therapeutic uses for men (or women for that matter) other than to enhance performance of some sort. We also tend to think of testosterone as an agression drug, which it certainly is. But there may be another use for this potent male hormone.

Testosterone patches and injections were recently used in a study on heart patients. And the study did include some women as well, although the study was mostly made up of men. Probably because they would worry about women developing secondary male traits from being on the male hormone too long.

The administration of testosterone helped these recovering heart patients in a couple of ways. First, it allowed them to be more physical and gave them more strength and stamina, something that typically is robbed from heart patients, especially after they have undergone surgery or have had one heart attack.

It also helped them to breathe properly, which is another common issue for people with heart conditions. They have a hard time breathing properly, especially when undergoing physical exertion of any kind. This causes a chain reaction where they are deprived of enough oxygen. Oxygen supplies vital energy and helps further your ability to get around and physically exert yourself without becoming “winded” easily.

Oxygen also supplies you with important energy and fuel for your brain and other major organs, so when you are not breathing properly, your organs and ultimately your brain are not going to perform optimally which causes you to easily fatigue and to generally not feel well a lot of the time.

In tests involving heart patients who were either on a placebo treatment or on the testosterone, the patients who were on the testosterone treatments were able to walk significantly further than those not on the testosterone, which shows that it did help with their physical abilities.

Many people often shrink into themselves after having a heart condition and think they cannot exert themselves, so this treatment could really give them the confidence to know that they can still be physical and can still be in the land of the living without worrying about every step they take.

This could be a great boon to the medical industry. I wanted to write about this because I know men are significantly higher risk for heart disease, although women are quickly gaining on them in this arena. See our previous article on why it is important for men to maintain heart health.

Well, there you have it. Not only is being overweight bad for your self esteem and ultimately your sex life, but it also makes you less likely to be able to successfully father a child. What I mean is, to get a woman pregnant in the first place, not on your parenting skills if you already have one

We know for sure that being overweight has a bearing on almost every aspect of your life. It can help you to live longer and more healthfully to maintain a healthy weight. It can influence your risk of getting prostate cancer.  It can even influence how much you are able to concentrate and focus. It also has a huge bearing on your social life, your self esteem and self confidence, and therefore on your success with women.

And now, there is concrete proof that being overweight doens’t just influence these other important areas of your life, but it also torpedoes your very manhood. It reduces your sperm count according to the latest research on male fertility and the connection to obesity and carrying extra weight around.

Not only are heavier men more likely to have low sperm counts, but they are also much more likely to have no sperm counts at all. That’s right, heavier men are more likely to be shooting blanks, as it has been so affectionately termed, than their normal-weight counterparts, which suggests that the body looks at this as a secondary need, and puts the resources on other parts of the body and organs that it needs to survive when one is above their healthy weight.

Not only is the quantity of the sperm affected by excessive weight, but the quality is as well. Men who are heavier tend to have sperm of a lower quality, meaning the DNA may be damaged more often, the sperm may be slower swimmers, and the shape of the sperm may be such that they cannot travel as quickly as the others.

As you know, this means everything in the world of sperm, where the fastest swimmers are the ones that make it to the female’s egg in order to fertilize it and begin the conception of a child.

The difference between men who were simply over their ideal weight and men who were downright considered to be in the obese category was tremendous. Men who were obese as opposed to simply overweight were at least double the risk for having no sperm at all in their semen or to having lower quality sperm or less of a sperm count.

When it came to comparing obese men to perfectly- weighted men, the obese men were almost three times as likely to have a quality and quantity issue in their sperm production.  So weight has quite a bit to do with – well – everything in our lives it seems!  All the more reason to maintain a healthy weight.

It was once thought that there may be some potentially protective properties of common OTC painkillers like ibuprofen and aspirin, both anti-inflammatories  by nature, and preventing the enlargement and inflammation of the male prostate gland.

Inflammation of the prostate as well as enlargement are both very big concerns for men since prostate cancer is the most common predominant “male” cancer that is out there, and the chance that you get it only increases with age.  In fact, many say that if a man were to live his life out with no other disease and nothing else killed him, every man would still eventually die of prostate cancer because this organ is so susceptible to inflammation and enlargement.

You can see why prostate health would be a dire concern for most men, especially as they age. So every time there is a supplement or some other drug that can help prevent problems with this important gland in the male anatomy, of course it is jumped on as a very important and potentially life saving development.

A major study was performed to see if there was any validity to the protective properties of these cheap and very common painkillers. Unfortunately, the outcome of the studies did not show any like between taking these products on a regular basis and a lower likelihood of problems with the prostate.

This is definitely disappointing, but there are still many other supplements that are thought to be helpful for prostate health. The most powerful weapons you have in helping ensure the continued health of your prostate is to eat well.

Avoid a lot of high fat foods, and limit your fat intake to omega 3 fatty acids, which are highly anti-inflammatory in nature and also which happen to have benefits when it comes to heart and circulatory health, all of which can have a trickle down effect on prostate health.

Studies show that folate, antioxidants and minerals are beneficial to this important gland’s functionality – and guess what is chock full of these nutrients? Fruits and vegetables. And not the canned and pickled kind, but the fresh, organic variety. They protect your tissues from morphing into cancerous tissue and they also protect them from inflammation, which is a primary reason behind the enlargement of the prostate.

Other anti-inflammatories also did not fair well in the study. Naproxen, which is the primary ingredient in Aleve, which is one of my favorite over the counter pain relievers for muscle pain, is another that did not rate highly in its protective qualities.

Like I said – try to rely on a healthful, wholesome diet to protect your prostate and the other numerous organs the protect your life and will keep you to a ripe, golden age.

Being a man, and probably being in tune with the problems that often plague men, you have definitely heard of a heart stent. It is basically something that directs the flow of blood properly through the various chambers that need it.

It is for when there are blockages of blood flow essentially, and when you get a stent in your heart, there is usually some sort of concern of a blockage and of heart disease, or there may have even already been a heart attack that happened and they are trying to prevent another.

A major medical equipment company that has been making heart stents for a long time is now going to be releasing a stent for the penis.  Since erectile dysfunction is most often caused by the same thing that occurs in hearts when blood flow is not adequate or not directed correctly, they thought they could apply the same logic to the penis.

Often times when a man cannot get or maintain an erection or suffers from premature ejaculation, it is because he has blood flow issues either in his whole body, or strictly to his penis. It can occur with age, stress, and lots of other variables, but it does often happen in older men.

The stent that is being created is designed to be small enough to fit in the pudendal artery, which is the artery up near the pelvis which directs the blood flow to the penis, and provides adequate blood to this area for when a man gets sexually excited and gets an erection.

It would basically be a surgery where the stent, which would be tiny in size, would be threaded up through the pelvis. Not sure exactly how painful that would be, but aren’t you glad it doesn’t go right into the penis itself?  That I think I would have a hard time with!

The penile stent is in clinical testing right now, and about half of the men that have had it who had previous erectile dysfunction problems actually were able to come off of their ED medications.  This could mean incredible sales for this operation, but it really depends on a few things.

First off, if it is cost prohibitive compared to medications, men won’t go for it. Second, if the surgery is too painful or too involved, men will not like that either. If it’s a relatively easy outpatient surgery, then this could be pretty huge for guys who want to ditch their impotence drugs.

Heart attacks used to be widely considered a “male thing”. Although of course this is a misnomer, and women are increasingly at risk for heart attacks and have always had somewhat of a risk, men still are in a bit more danger statistically to die of heart failure than women are.  In related news, see our story on why taking aspirin for heart health may not be a good idea.

Why this is, I don’t know, but the statistics don’t lie, and the research shows that women who suffer heart failure, with all other variables such as age being the same, lived longer than their male counterparts within three years of experiencing heart failure. Men were a whopping 31% more likely to die than the women were in this study within that time frame.

Interestingly, women were prescribed “after heart failure” drugs than men, which may help to explain why they had a higher survival rate. So is this saying that men shouldn’t go on these “survival” drugs, or just that woman’s heart have an overall natural advantage in strength to overcome heart failure and other heart problems?

Since the exact reason probably will not be known for some time, it’s important that men, as always simply take care of their hearts. Look at Davy Jones. He was not even overweight nor in bad health when he had his heart attack, so heart attacks can strike any man.

Here are some of the best tips for keeping your ticker healthy :

1.)  Avoid stimulants such as caffeinated coffee, potent energy drinks and weight loss drugs or herbal supplement for weight loss that use energy stimulation as one of their mechanisms for prompting a lower appetite and less bingeing.  If you want energy, take a good men’s health supplement, which combines the vitamins and minerals most likely to fuel the male body with the energy it needs to get through the day easily.

2.)  Exercise. Preferably at least five days a week in some fashion. If you have a desk job, get up at least once an hour and walk around and do squats or something else to get your blood pumping throughout your entire body, or walk briskly.

It is is of vital important that people with desk jobs do this. More and more, a sedentary lifestyle is being linked to poor blood flow and blood quality, which is linked to heart attacks and strokes in men (and women).

3.)  Watch your saturated fat intake. Avoid partially hydrogenated oils (transfats) all together. These are artery and vein clogging, and collect in the blood, making it thicker and more sticky, which can give you heart problems in a jiffy.

Increase you fiber intake as well, and take a good omega 3 supplement. This can be flax seed oil if you hate fish oil, or of course a really good fish oil supplement. Even better, try a krill supplement which has all the benefits of fish oil and some added antioxidants, which add to heart health.

Omega 3′s are one of the best overall anti aging products for men to take as they promote energy, heart and circulatory health, and increase longevity if take the right way and along with a healthy lifestyle.

In very exciting news for men who have struggled with hair loss, early balding and male pattern baldness (all largely due to heredity), scientists think they have discovered a pivotal protein that plays a part in deciding whether men will grow old with full heads of hair, or start losing it in their twenties or thirties.  See our past stories on preventing baldness and regrowing hair and how a street drug may help men grow hair.

Often times men do lose their hair this young.  They may suddenly start to notice thinning at the crown of their head, which is the typical male pattern baldness, or they may start to get widow’s peaks and start experiencing a lot of thinning at the front of the head.

Either way, it’s pretty much devastating to the male psyche when he starts losing his hair. It’s a sign of youth – of virility, and it’s often a difficult pill to swallow.  Speaking of pills, there are several good herbal remedies and systems out there now for male hair loss too.

So what or who is the nasty culprit behind most male pattern baldness cases? It’s a protein called Prostaglandin D2 (PGD2). The way they figured out this was the culprit was they took samples from men’s follicles and scalps who were both bald and had full heads of hair.

In addition, prostaglandins in general have been suspected to be useful both in the growth and the inhibition of growth of hair. When they tested this specific protein on mice, they found that the protein slowed the growth of hair enough to confirm their hypothesis.

What they found is that men who were experiencing hair loss or full on balding had roughly five times this protein in their follicles and scalp tissue than men who had no issues at all. And voila baby, that’s how modern science works. By the process of elimination, they had their guy.

Now they are hoping that effective male hair loss treatments are not far behind. Since they now have a solid basis for genetically identifying the reason, and with all the advances in gene therapy and genetic and DNA research, they really should be able to come up with an effective gene or DNA based treatment.

The question is, how long will it be? We all know how long simply developing medications and treatments can take. Then you have the rigorous, exhaustive FDA approval process, and the clinical trials as well that are required.   We do have some recommendations for male hair loss products in the mean time.

So we could still be looking at this being a ways off. But at least it gives hope that a truly effective, one size fits all type of treatment is in the future.

Have you seen the movie “Love and Other Drugs”?  It’s about a womanizing pharmaceutical sales rep played by Jake Gyllenhall, who although I think is a talented actor was miscast in this movie.  He falls madly in love with Anne Hathaway’s character who has an incurable disease.

A side note on the movie is that it has a heavy back story in Viagra.  Gyllenhall’s character is lucky enough to be a rep for the company that first puts out the brand name of this drug, so a lot of the jokes are about the impotence drug in the movie.  The movie is set in the nineties by the way.

Viagra roared onto the drug scene in the nineties. It started off as a glaucoma drug, until it was realized it served a better purpose of forcing blood into the penile chambers and producing easier erections in men.

While there were concerns about high blood pressure patients taking the drug, and still are, Viagra went on to become one of the biggest blockbuster drugs in the history of pharmaceuticals as we know them today.  It is still one of the biggest sellers, although generics are of course now able to be sold since the period for exclusivity is over.

A new one is currently being tested in order to be able to go to market called “Uprima”.  This one does not work by the same mechanism as the other popular impotence drugs on the market, which is to stimulate local blood flow to the penis, but rather it works by stimulating the part of the brain that produces dopamine.

Higher levels of dopamine may be associated with a higher libido, and also increase erections.  It has yet to reach market, but when it does we will write about it for you.

The other two that are in neck and neck competition with Viagra are Levitra and Cialis. These two really work by the same mechanism as Viagra, which is by utilizing some function of blood flow to help men get and sustain erections and also to avoid another embarrasing sexual condition, which is premature ejaculation or a penis that cannot get hard all the way.

With Viagra, Levtra and Cialis, it really depends on a matter of taste in which one works best for you.  Some men may prefer one over the other because either it produces better results or it doesn’t have negative side effects for them. Every man’s body is different when it comes to erectile dysfunction drugs, so the various drugs that are available will affect men in different ways.

Since these drugs all work by increasing penile blood flow, there are usually warnings to not take them if you have heart problems, are physically unable or high risk to perform vigorous sex, or if you have high blood pressure. This is why the previous stories we ran about “herbal remedies” containing erectile drugs is so alarming, because guys usually take herbal options to avoid the pitfalls of the pharmaceuticals.

Hello fellas, it’s Jill here today. Let me just say something. The fact that Zac Efron, who is a total heart throb amongst the teen and early twenty set, dropped a condom while walking the red carpet for a premier of one of his films – a children’s film no less – makes him my hero.

He actually made it “cool” to use condoms to a group of women and men who are in the cross fire when it comes to being at risk for STD’s, unwanted pregnancies, and all the other unfortunate emotional and physical side effects that can render from having unprotected sex when you’re young and somewhat unattached.

Condoms have gone through phases of being considered a nuisance to a necessity, from cool to not cool, you name it. Ever since I was sexually active at least. I know that I considered them to be a passion killer when I was in my twenties and wasn’t really attached to anyone, but I also considered them a necessity, especially when I wasn’t serious with anyone and might be sleeping with several people within the year.

I mean, is it really worth gettin pregnant, or worse getting a sexually transmitted disease, especially when you’re not in a monogomous relationship with someone? Not to mention, you’re risking your entire life over a few minutes of passion and “heat of the moment” emotions.  I guess they were always better than an IUD as far as birth control goes though…

Sex tends to cloud everyone’s judgement though. And it’s not like we as humans picture a totally nasty sex romp with our partner fumbling to put on a condom before we do the nasty. They don’t ever really show that in the movies, after all. I can’t think of one hot love scene that made me turned on and got my pheromones going that started that way, can you?

The fact is, now that I’m an adult woman in my late thirties, I see the need for condoms. I’m not gonna say I always practiced safe condom sex when I was younger, but I did a lot of the time, and I knew how important it was in preventing things I didn’t want at that time in my life (pregnancy) or ever (STD).

I only hope that as time goes on they make condoms a little sexier, a little more pleasurable for both users, and make it feel a little less plastic-y when you’re having sex. That part never was fun. They need to make it texture more like a real penis – now that would catch on fast!  Hey, at least this guy invented a handled condom a little while ago, there’s a start in better usability at least!