Viagra for women

Can doses of testosterone restore a woman’s libido?

It turns out that testosterone could be the answer for post-menopausal women with low libidos and high sexual dissatisfaction, said Josh Goldstein in the Philadelphia Inquirer. A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that after 24 weeks, test subjects wearing testosterone patches, but not taking estrogen, “experienced a significant increase in desire” and “satisfying sexual episodes.”

There were some downsides to the testosterone patches, said Rob Stein in The Washington Post online, like new growths of body hair and, more worrisome, some possibly unrelated cases of breast cancer. Still, this research could be important, as “studies indicate that a lot of women have problems with their love lives.”

It’s true that in a new study of 31,000 women, 43 percent said they “had difficulties with desire, arousal, or orgasm,” said Elizabeth Cooney in The Boston Globe online, but “only 12 percent said they were troubled by” those difficulties. You could argue that if 40 percent of otherwise healthy women have low libidos, it isn’t a disorder and needn’t be treated as such.