Thursday AM TOPS Gets The Rundown on Walking

The cumulative weight loss for the week was 26 pounds. The must … TOPS: After someone loses weight, how can walking help keep the weight off?

Thursday AM TOPS Gets The Rundown on Walking

Addyi 'Female Viagra' Gets FDA Approval, But With Warnings

The “female Viagra,” which will be commercially known as Addyi, was approved by the FDA and will be available on the market on October.

By Suzette Gutierrez | Aug 20, 2015 08:01 AM EDT

The side effects of Addyi include hypotension, loss of consciousness, dizziness, nausea, insomnia, sleepiness and fatigue. (Photo : Twitter Photo Section)

Addyi, the “female Viagra,” finally got the green light from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, but not without warnings about potential side effects. The FDA approved the little pink pill Tuesday, giving a cause for celebration to those who have campaigned for its approval in spite of two previous rejections. Janet Woodcock, FDA’s director for the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said the drug gives women with low sexual desire “an approved treatment option.”

“The FDA strives to protect and advance the health of women, and we are committed to supporting the development of safe and effective treatments for female sexual dysfunction,” Woodcock said in a press release.

Flibanserin, which will be commercially known as Addyi, is the first drug approved as treatment for lack or absence of libido, a condition called generalized hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD). It is targeted specifically for premenopausal women. Before Addyi, no other drug has received FDA approval to treat sexual desire disorders in both men and women, the FDA said.

Unlike Viagra, which addresses erectile dysfunction and is taken before intercourse, Addyi is to be taken every night. That’s because while the little blue pill treats a physical problem, the little pink pill deals with chemicals in the brain and acts more like an antidepressant.

Flibanserin was rejected twice before: once in 2010 while it was still under Boehringer when the FDA dismissed it as having the same effect as a placebo, and another time in 2013 under Sprout Pharmaceuticals when it was rejected on grounds of its adverse side effects outweighing its benefits.

“It has been a remarkable journey to get to this breakthrough moment. Today we celebrate what this approval means for all women who have long awaited a medical treatment option for this life impacting condition,” Sprout Pharmaceuticals chief executive officer Cindy Whitehead said in a press release. “We applaud the FDA for putting the patient voice at the center of the conversation and for focusing on scientific evidence.”

“This is the biggest breakthrough for women’s sexual health since the pill,” National Consumers League executive director Sally Greenberg said, according to The New York Times.

However, the FDA gives strong warnings about the side effects of Addyi, which can cause hypotension (or extremely low blood pressure) and loss of consciousness. These side effects are increased during alcohol intake because alcohol interferes with the drug’s breakdown in the body. The FDA warns that “health care professionals must assess the likelihood of the patient reliably abstaining from alcohol before prescribing Addyi.”

“Because of a potentially serious interaction with alcohol, treatment with Addyi will only be available through certified health care professionals and certified pharmacies,” Woodcock said. “Patients and prescribers should fully understand the risks associated with the use of Addyi before considering treatment.”

The drug’s other side effects include dizziness, nausea, fatigue, sleepiness, insomnia and dry mouth.

Addyi is expected to be available to consumers on Oct. 17.

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Addyi "Female Viagra" Gets FDA Approval, But With Warnings

Judith Woods: Who gets married for the good of their health?

Photo: Alamy

There are occasions – a Verdi requiem, the terraces at Anfield, the X Factor final – when just one voice, however melodious or heartfelt or lip-synched, is simply not enough.

So in response to the news than men get a health boost from marriage while women do not, I offer a random selection of comments from my inner circle of girlfriends.

“In that case, you’d think my husband would be a lot nicer to me.”

“No wonder he demands round-the-clock nursing when he gets man flu. He’s afraid that if I leave, he’ll snuff it.”

“When my mother used to scrub the kitchen table like a martyr, muttering ‘I’m not doing all this for the good of my health’, I had no idea she literally meant HER health.”

Let me hasten to state for the record that we’re not militant martinets or angry feminazis. Far from it.

^{Tim Hunt: forced to resign (Photo: AP)}

In general, we enjoy the company of men, and not just because we find that each other’s solicitous spouses are invariably more charming to us than our own.

In particular, we feel genuinely sorry for poor Nobel laureate Tim Hunt, forced to resign over a couple of lame remarks about women in laboratories, hounded by a load of humourless, thin-skinned harpies.

We don’t hate our husbands; reader, we married them. But there is something undeniably irksome about the fact that grooms enjoy added health benefits when they tie the knot, but brides don’t.

•I knew I was marrying the wrong person

•Charity hunts pensioner who left handwritten note in 1950s wedding dress

Trickle-down wealth does not, it seems, equate with trickle-down health. According to research by University College London, the London School of Economics and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (who must surely make for unbearably bumptious bedfellows), men who wed are markedly healthier than their single counterparts.

While both parties remain, once married, as likely to develop metabolic syndrome – an unhappy combination of diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity known to the rest of us as irritable-wine-and-crisps-disorder – an act of marital union confers no health advantages the woman. None. Poor, batty Miss Havisham would have gone mad either way.

I can’t help thinking that if we’d known this factoid earlier last week, we would have been spared the prickly debate surrounding the new book of the summer, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, by the irresistibly-named Kate Bolick (sadly not a plural), in which she espouses the superiority of the single life.

Interestingly, when I asked assorted men if marriage was better than single life they all agreed it was – in theory.

In practice, however, there wasn’t nearly as much sex as they’d been given to believe. Oh, and nobody flagged up the nagging. The health dividend, however, went unremarked upon.

“If a child’s ingratitude is sharper than a serpent’s tooth, a husband’s ingratitude is a stake through the heart, dipped in anthrax,” says a separated friend of mine, who is battling her ex in the divorce courts. She claims that if he’d been a lot more appreciative out of bed and a little more awake in it, she could have kept the marriage going, at least until the children had left school.

For his part, he belongs to the “she nagged too much” camp, and also bemoans the lack of congress, which makes you wonder what on earth was stopping them.

^{Women crave a grown-up gap year (Photo: SCPhotos / Alamy)}

What’s stopping them now, of course, is the prospect of a decree absolute.

Women are the main instigators of divorce, with 66 per cent of marriages ending – after 11 and a half years, on average – following wifely intervention. But then men have a tendency to dig in and wait for the woman to lose patience and sort things out herself.

Yet, significantly, among those silver splitters aged 60-pluswho get divorced after 30 years or more, men are every bit as likely to start proceedings as women.

And men are inclined to ricochet, unimaginatively if healthily, straight into marriage with a younger partner. Women who cut loose tend to crave new experiences, fresh challenges and a grown-up gap year, but without the illegal stripping at sacred sites.

Divorce is a drastic option by any measure. The virtues of marriage extend far beyond body mass index and blood pressure.

There could be a marriage benefit for employers, too. Rather than offering health cover, relationship counselling might be more economical. The wealth of a nation resides in the health of a nation, so instead of that exorbitantly expensive annual medical, why not a marital MOT? For male staff, at any rate.

As for female executives? No need. Travel vouchers or a weekend spa break would be just fine, thanks.

Judith Woods: Who gets married for the good of their health?