Drug shows promise in treating priapism

Thanks to new research at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, a solution will help thousands of men that are afflicted with an embarrassing and painful condition that triggers spontaneous, long-lasting erections (priapism).

Current findings appear online and will be in the March 2010 print issue of The FASEB Journal, the journal of The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.

Researchers believe priapism is linked to elevated levels of a signaling molecule called adenosine. The link was discovered when they noticed that genetically-deficient mice with elevated levels of adenosine also had spontaneous erections lasting many hours.  The team described their unexpected finding last year in a paper published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.  Subsequent work from this group has appeared in two articles published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine.