Viagra might make you live LONGER, scientists discover

VIAGRA could do more than give your sex life a boost, scientists say.

The little blue pill known for giving a helping hand to men in the bedroom could also help you live longer, according a study by French and Swiss researchers.

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Men prescribed sildenafil – the active ingredient in Viagra – were 15 per cent less likely to die during the course of the study which examined 40 years of data, Mail Online reported.

It comes as after researchers from University College London found that Viagra and other erectile dysfunction drugs could slash your risk of Alzheimer’s disease by 18 per cent.

The study by biotech start-up EPITERNA, which has yet to be reviewed for flaws in its methodology, analysed the medical records of 500,000 Brits from the UK Biobank study, analysing the health outcomes of over 400 medications.

The drugs under review included the antibiotic amoxicillin, cholesterol medication simvastatin and the opioid painkiller morphine, most of which had a “negative” effect on people’s lifespans.

Morphine, for example, was linked to a 456 per cent heightened risk of dying, according to researchers, who said this was “probably due to the underlying negative effect of the disease the drug is intended for”.

Sildenafil was found to have a “beneficial” effect on lifespans, though researchers were unsure about why this was.

The team claimed the study results “warrant further investigation in randomised controlled trials”.  

Patients included in the study were aged between 37 and 73 who had been prescribed a drug for three months – 54 per cent of them were women.

But only men who took sildenafil were examined.

Researchers didn’t indicate how often the patients took Viagra or other drugs, or why they were taking them.

Aside from being used to combat erectile dysfunction, sildenafil is also prescribe to both men and women to treat pulmonary hypertension – a condition that makes the heart work harder than normal to pump blood into the lungs.

The scientists acknowledged that other factors aside from the little blue pill may have also improved patients’ life expectancy, such as diet or exercise. 

It comes after the Mail reported that erection-enhancing pills have been linked to more than 200 deaths in Britain between 1998 and 2024, though none of the fatalities are proven to have been directly caused by the drugs.