Mens Health Blog. Medical Blog

APHRODISIACS

Children and Sexual Response Cycle

It may be hard for us to imagine children as sexual creatures. Boys and girls may say that they think that the other sex is “yucky.” Therefore, we think of sexual attraction as something we grow into at puberty and in adulthood. Or we may think that we learn sexual attraction. We mistakenly think that without sexual attraction there is no physical response of the sexual systems.

Erotic response is not a learned behavior or a process that happens only in adult life. Children respond to stimulation and touch from the moment they are born. Baby girls are capable of lubricating. Their clitorises swell. Baby boys get erections. The sexual response system is a reflex that we are born with. It is associated with sexual desire, attraction, and fantasy as we grow older.

Aphrodisiacs

Drugs, foods, drinks, and odors that are supposed to create or increase sexual desire are called aphrodisiacs. “Aphrodisiac” comes from the name of the mythical Greek goddess of love and beauty, Aphrodite. Some well-known examples of so-called aphrodisiacs are rhinoceros horn, oysters, perfume, and vitamin E. Most aphrodisiacs don’t work. In fact, some of them may be harmful to your health. There are chemicals that are known to affect sexual desire. However, these chemicals are often illegal and dangerous, and in some people, they may produce a lack of sexual desire. All aphrodisiacs may pose health risks during pregnancy—for the woman and her fetus. They may also interfere with our intentions to practice safer sex.

Here is a list of aphrodisiacs, their rumored effect, and the real results.

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Resolution is the last phase of the sexual response cycle. This is the time after orgasm when the body returns to the way it was before sexual excitement. Both women and men enter this state. While a man’s body is returning to a nonaroused state, he loses his erection and experiences a refractory period. During this time, men cannot get another erection. The length of the refractory period for young men is normally very short. The length of the refractory period increases with age. It will take an older man longer to be able to get another erection after he has ejaculated.

Women do not have a refractory period. They can be sexually aroused immediately after orgasm. The box on the next page shows what happens to our couple during the resolution phase.

Changes in our bodies during resolution phase

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Successful ageing is like fence maintenance. As we age some of the slats in our fences break, become wobbly or fall over.

Traditionally, this is when we seek help. We go to doctors, who then dash around the outside, fixing, patching and trying to stop the whole structure from sagging.

But the latest approach to successful ageing is different. Rather
than waiting for damage to declare itself, it urges us to keep check
ing the fence for vulnerable spots and to strengthen it from the
inside.    ’

There are several ways of doing this, and any improvement in diet and exercise will help, but the most recent notion is to keep control of the bodily systems that implement ageing.

Once the body has received the signal to begin ageing, the process is put into effect largely by the endocrine system. It is almost as if an order is received for a murder, and the endocrine system is the hitman.

Through carefully monitoring and modifying six hormones in this system, the fence can be strengthened and ageing partially held at bay. These hormones are mighty powerful. They bring on the major transformation from childhood to adolescence from which two or three decades of adult vigour follow. But then, from about the age of 40, they start turning down.

From mid-life onwards, there is a subtle decline in six essential hormone systems: insulin, oestrogen, testosterone, DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone), thyroxin and growth hormone. These subtle declines set in motion the adverse metabolic changes of later life. Once begun, this ageing process can be amplified by lifestyle factors such as inactivity, poor nutrition, cause of    mental turmoil, rising blood pressure, high cholesterol and declining cardiac function.

As new century turned, anti-ageing clinics begun popping up in Australia. Just as in the last decade impotence clinics proliferated across the country, so in the next decade it is predicted there will be a rash of anti-ageing clinics.

One Sydney clinic based strictly on orthodox medicine says a lot of what it does is, in clinical terms, old hat. But its approach is different in that it focuses on wellness, not illness. With great caution, it also uses some therapies that are theoretically sound but have not yet stood the full test of time.

Ageing is a complex process. It is a steady loss in functional reserve that slowly reduces what we can accomplish. We continue to go down gradually until a significant stress, such as a disease, comes along and one of our systems fails.

The aim of anti-ageing medicine is to help people retain function as long as possible and to compress morbidity into the very end of life. We have partial insight into how we can achieve this.

Just look at societies outside the affluent West. Many people there die young, but those who do not do so retain their function deep into old age. We see it on television every week, as another tragic group of refugees flees its home. Among these refugees are fit elderly people walking along, carrying bundles, enduring tremendous hardship and looking well, if exhausted.

The Sydney clinic covers all the traditional areas of health and then focuses on the endocrine system.

The first hormone to be tested is insulin. The body’s ongoing ability to burn sugar is pivotal in determining how it will age.

Oestrogen and testosterone are next. At high levels, these hormones drive sexual differentiation, but at low levels they have other vital metabolic roles. In both sexes, small amounts of oestrogen are crucial for bone remodelling and for nurturing brain cells; small quantities are also essential for male fertility.

At low levels, testosterone is important for brain development, muscle and bone strength, fat control, emotional stability and libido.

The fourth hormone tested at this clinic is DHEA, which has been called the mother of all hormones. It is the raw material for the manufacture of oestrogen and testosterone, and since it has fallen into lay hands, extravagant claims have been made for its remedial effects. It has, however, been established that it is safe when administered in correct doses, and supplementation in mid-life is said to assist in maintaining bone and muscle mass, promoting a feeling of wellbeing and lifting female libido.

The fifth hormone tested for is from the thyroid. While 5 per cent of older women are known to have thyroxin deficiency and need a full replacement, a much larger proportion of ageing men and women suffer relative thyroid inefficiency and may benefit from judicious thyroxin supplementation. This can help counter listlessness, dry, puffy skin, brittle hair and middle-age spread.

The final test is for growth hormone, which triggers the growth of fresh cells in bones, organs and muscles. It plays a large part in the hormonal abundance that creates that ‘bloom of youth’ and declines rapidly with age. At 60, people have less than a quarter of the growth hormone they had at 20. It is effective in converting fat to muscle and small studies have shown it can take 10 years off a body.

The primary rationale of this endocrine approach is not so much to reclaim youth as it is to forestall age-related diseases.

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You may not feel like one, but technically speaking, you’re a ‘young blood’. No matter how old you are chronologically, no single red blood cell in your body is older than about 4 months.

Your blood is constantly being renewed, and if you look after yourself well and don’t become ill, at the age of 70 you could have a blood profile indistinguishable from that of a healthy 30-year-old.

The Red Cross Blood Service knows this, which is why it is willing to let people donate blood up to the age of 70. It will even take blood from those older than 70 if they have a letter from their doctor confirming that they are in good health. There is no formal cut-off date beyond that.

There is nothing wrong with an older person’s blood, and the routine age limit is there for the protection of the donor, not the recipient. As older people are more likely to have cardiovascular disease, donating blood may be risky for them. Such is the confidence of the Red Cross in older people’s blood that 3 years ago, when blood services were standardised across Australia, some States had their age limits lifted from 65.

Blood has an enormous capacity for self-renewal. Stem cells in the marrow and in the blood have the unique capacity not only to generate new blood but also to renew themselves. Blood does not deteriorate because you age; it deteriorates because diseases that interfere with it become more common with age.

The worst of these are the blood malignancies of leukaemia, lymphoma and myeloma that no-one yet knows how to prevent.

But while the blood in your veins is fresh, it bears many signs of what is going wrong in the rest of the body. From blood you can, for example, determine how low your level of hormones has sunk, how far over the cholesterol safety limit you are and whether you are a candidate for diabetes.

Importantly, you can also tell your body’s iron status. Iron can be a crucial determinant of how well you age. Too much can lead to cancer, while there is now an informed suspicion that too little may be linked to dementia.

If your body keeps accumulating iron and can’t get rid of it, you have what is known as haemochromatosis. There is too much iron in your blood and the excess is deposited in major organs. Australians have an unusually high potential for this disease, which begins insidiously and can end disastrously in liver cancer. Along the way it may cause general malaise, fatigue, joint pain, impotence and diabetes.

A study of the population around Margaret River in Western Australia found that one in seven people carry one gene for this disease. To have hereditary haemochromatosis you must have two genes. One in nineteen people have both genes. Most of them will accumulate excess iron and become unwell as a result. A quarter will develop liver problems. The tragedy of this is that haemochromatosis is easily diagnosed and just as easily treated. Next time you go for a routine health check, it is worth asking for a haemochromatosis blood test. You’ll be tested for the level of iron in your blood and for the gene. If you have the disease, you can control it simply by donating blood regularly. If you are diagnosed before the age of 40, you can avoid the discomfort of having a liver biopsy.

There is a common misconception that menstruation protects women from haemochromatosis for life. It doesn’t. Once past menopause, if they have the genes, women accumulate iron and catch up quickly. Too little iron, on the other hand, is a common cause of anaemia and there is now a suspected link between anaemia and dementia.

An anaemic person has low levels of haemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in the blood. This condition can be caused by other factors too, including a poor diet or vitamin B12 and folate deficiency. Even relatively mild long-term anaemia might have serious consequences for the brain. With age, the blood vessels to the brain can ‘harden’ and restrict the flow of blood, thereby depriving the cells of oxygen. This can compromise brain function and leave the person with what is known as vascular dementia. If the person is also anaemic, the problem is compounded. Not only is the volume of blood reaching the brain reduced, but it also carries less oxygen than it could.

About 20 per cent of Australians over the age of 75 are anaemic and often something simple can be done to correct it. However, because anaemia has many different causes, it is important to consult a doctor about which treatments are appropriate.

Current research suggests vascular dementia may be involved in a third or more of all dementia cases in Australia. It is possible that if anaemia could be diagnosed and treated earlier, fewer people would develop dementia. But once a person has dementia, treating their anaemia is not likely to cure it. At best it may relieve some symptoms.

It may be that the risks are greatest for people with cardiovascular disease and related factors such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol. If you are such a person, you could probably benefit from a more aggressive management of your condition so that rather than risking disease and dementia, you allow your perpetually youthful blood to work its miracles and keep you well and functional.

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