Male hormone patch may boost sex drive in women

Melbourne, Australia, November 6: A new research has found that a testosterone patch may significantly help older women improve their flagging sexual drive.

Loss of sexual desire in middle age may be linked to lowered levels of sex hormonesdefine. This can be alleviated by hormone replacement therapy in females and, possibly, testosterone treatment therapy in men.

Now, a company-sponsored study suggests that Procter & Gamble's Intrinsa testosterone patches can treat the loss of sex desire in women.

Sponsored by Procter & Gamble Co., the Cincinnati-based maker of a testosterone patch, the study was published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

To see the effects of Intrinsa testosterone patch on postmenopausal women with low libido, lead researcher Susan Davis of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and colleagues recruited 814 women from the U.S., Canada, Australia, the U.K. and Sweden, ages 20 to 70 years old, who had reported personal distress linked with low desire.

The study women, who were postmenopausal for at least a year, were randomly assigned to one of the three groups: treatment with daily doses of 150 micrograms, treatment with 300 micrograms of testosterone daily or a placebo patch.

After 24 weeks, Susan and colleagues found that though the women reported improved sexual function after they were treated with a patch in which the male hormone testosterone was applied through the skin, only those on the higher dose (300 microgram) had a statistically significant increase in satisfying sexual episodes.

The group on higher dose reported an increase of 2.1 satisfying sexual episodes per month for each four weeks, compared to 1.2 sexually satisfying episodes for those on the lower dose and an average increase of less than one (0.7) episode for those on placebo, the study found.

"The increase in the frequency of satisfying sexual episodes was modest but appeared to be clinically meaningful," the study researchers wrote.

The testosterone patch is available in Europe to treat a loss of sexual desire in women, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration turned down the Procter & Gamble's request to market the Intrinsa patch in the U.S. in December 2004, citing a lack of long-term safety data, the study authors said. The health watchdog said at the time that more research was needed to prove the patch would not raise the risk of heart disease and cancerdefine.

Although the Intrinsa patches have shown significant positive effects on sexual drive, the researchers have also noticed an increase in unwanted hair growth, the most common hormone side effect, in the higher-dose group.

"This is the first study to show that when used alone, testosterone administered by a skin patch significantly improves sexual well-being in postmenopausal women," said Dr. Susan adding that more research is required to assess the long-term safety of testosterone use in women with estrogen depletion.