Effects of Kisspeptin Administration in Women With Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder: A Randomized Clinical Trial

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Kisspeptin-10, published as a randomized controlled trial.

To test the hypothesis that kisspeptin enhances sexual and attraction brain processing in women with HSDD.

Functional neuroimaging, psychometric, and hormonal analyses were employed to investigate the effects of kisspeptin administration on brain processing, in response to erotic stimuli (erotic videos) and facial attraction (face images of varying attractiveness).

Why It Was Studied

The hormone kisspeptin is a key endogenous activator of the reproductive hormonal axis with additional emerging roles in sexual and emotional behavior; however, its effects in women with HSDD are unknown.

ISRCTN trial registry identifier: ISRCTN17271094.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as adults, both men and women.

Eligible participants were premenopausal women with HSDD.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, placebo-controlled and crossover study.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Kisspeptin-10 and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Kisspeptin-10 group a baseline to be compared against.

Each person switched between Kisspeptin-10 and the comparison at some point, usually with a gap in between.

This randomized clinical trial was double-masked and placebo controlled with a 2-way crossover.

The trial was conducted in a university research setting in the UK from October 2020 to April 2021.

Data were analyzed from May to December 2021.

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Libido, Kisspeptins, Phentolamine, Sexual Dysfunctions, Psychological and Hormones.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, placebo-controlled and crossover study of Kisspeptin-10.

Results are reported in around 7 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2022 (JAMA network open), a journal based in United States.

More context: the Kisspeptin-10 compound page, all human trials.