The next female Viagra may not be a drug

Stimulating the brain, a novel way to boost women's libido.

Female sexuality has been ignored for much of history, and this is also reflected in the scientific progress that has been made on the subject.and this is also noticeable in the scientific progress that has been made on the subject. A paradigmatic case is that of sexual enhancers: there is still no version of Viagra for women that can be compared to its male analogue in terms of efficacy and mildness of side effects.

However, this may now be changing, with the appearance on the scene of an alternative, non-drug based intervention that acts directly on the brain.

The Addyi fiasco

It was not so long ago that the pill that was unofficially called "the female Viagra" began to be marketed.

Its real name is Addyi, and although the press spread its properties with enthusiasm, it soon proved to be very ineffective in increasing sexual desire, and it has also become increasingly clear that its side effects are too intense to consider this product as a hopeful alternative.

These disappointing results have made many researchers decide to tackle the problem from scratch, without taking too much for granted. One of the sexual enhancement methods for women that is being tested and that offers the most promising results is, for example, a tool that does not even rely on the release of an active ingredient through pills. In this case, the key is to stimulate parts of the brain by signals acting through the scalp and the bones of the skull.

Viagra for women, acting directly on the brain.

This promising tool has two different variants, but both are based on the use of electrical both are based on the use of electric shocks on parts of the brain related to the experience of pleasure and the reward system, all this without surgery. 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 over the head, which sends a diffuse electrical signal for about 20 minutes over strategically chosen areas of the brain.

This stimulation does not in itself serve to increase sexual desire; Its function is to make a greater variety of stimuli picked up by the senses be appreciated as sexually suggestive.. In other words, SCD serves to predispose.

An option to increase libido in women permanently.

The second option being worked on to intervene in the lack of sexual desire in women is called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS). This is a tool that started being studied basically as a resource to treat depression resistant to therapies (showing to be effective in this type of problems). Basically, TMS consists of the creation of a magnetic field around the head, by which the areas of the head that are which stimulates the areas of the brain that are related to the reward system. All this, without pain.

Specifically, it boosts the activity of those brain regions that react to pleasure and, in general, to 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 state of activation 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 overdoing it and generating the opposite problem.

The results obtained by using 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 TMS made the activation patterns of the parts of the brain that mediate the onset of pleasure significantly more intense.

Stimulating the brain, but without drugs

Both methods of brain stimulation have many advantages. Unlike drug treatment, they go to the root of the problem without going through the metabolization of substances circulating in the blood, and therefore their side effects should be much lower.

In addition, these two options under development propose different approaches.. TMS is used with the aim of introducing long-term changes in the functioning of the brain after undergoing a series of sessions in the clinic, while DCS proposes an instant solution whose effects last only a few minutes, just as conventional Viagra would.

Of course, there will always remain the debate as to whether lack of sexual desire is itself a clinical problem or not; it may not be the person's problem. However, that discussion cannot overshadow the fact that developing solutions for women who want to increase their sexual desire is beneficial.