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(Circulation. 2005;112:2894-2895.)
© 2005 American Heart Association, Inc.

Editorial

More Potential for Sildenafil Than Potency

Felix Mahler, MD; Iris Baumgartner, MD

From the Cardiovascular Department, University of Bern, Inselspital, Bern, Switzerland.

Correspondence to Professor Felix Mahler, Cardiovascular Department, University of Bern, Inselspital, CH-3010 Bern, Switzerland. E-mail felix.mahler@insel.ch

Key Words: Editorials • Raynaud’s phenomenon • pharmacology

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

Sildenafil (Viagra) has the reputation of a typical lifestyle drug. Already, Philip Roth has introduced it to the American literature as such in his novel, The Human Stain, in which the hero, Coleman Silk, a 70-year-old retired college professor, takes his regular Viagra before meeting his girlfriend, who is half his age.¹ Given that we are being bombarded by spam e-mail messages advertising sildenafil and other drugs in its group for cheap but uncontrolled sale, one is pleased to find a serious trial on a new indication for this substance in the current issue of Circulation.²

Article p 2890

Sildenafil was applied to patients with therapy-resistant Raynaud’s phenomenon (ischemic finger attacks) in a randomized, placebo-controlled study for 4 weeks in a dose of 50 mg twice daily. The authors report their results on 16 patients with severe secondary Raynaud’s phenomenon (mean age 49 years, range 22 to 74 years, 15 females) associated with either systemic sclerosis or mixed connective tissue disease. These patients showed not only an increase in the surrogate parameter of Doppler anemometric flow velocity in finger nail-fold capillaries but also a clinical improvement in Raynaud attacks in terms of severity, number, and duration. Moreover, the 6 patients with chronic ulcers at the fingertips exhibited a clear tendency for healing.

It is noteworthy that all of these patients were pretreated without success by other drugs such as nitroglycerine, calcium channel blockers, ACE inhibitors, prostanoids, bosentan, and pentoxifylline. Even though all patients showed a positive effect in . . . [Full Text of this Article]