Acute effects of nicotine on physiological and subjective sexual arousal in nonsmoking men: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide), published as a randomized controlled trial.

To provide the first empirical examination of the acute effects of isolated nicotine on sexual arousal in nonsmoking men.

Why It Was Studied

Chronic nicotine treatment has deleterious effects on vascular functioning and catecholamine modulation, which may compromise erectile functioning.

Evidence that long-term cigarette smoking is an independent risk factor for introducing impotence is robust.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as adults, men only.

Twenty-eight sexually functional heterosexual men (mean age 21 years), each with less than 100 direct exposures to nicotine, participated in a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, crossover trial.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled and crossover study.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

Neither the participants nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide), so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

Some participants received a placebo instead of Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide), giving a reference point.

In the crossover set-up each of the participants took both Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) and the comparison in turn, acting as their own control.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Acute Disease, Drug Administration Routes, Erectile Dysfunction, Erotica, Libido, Nicotine and Photoplethysmography.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide).

Results are reported in around 6 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2008 (The journal of sexual medicine), a journal based in Netherlands.

More context: the Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) compound page, all human trials.