Originally Posted by Shiver
The main risk with viagra is that it can lower blood pressure quite a bit. It preferentially targets PDE-5 which is an enzyme mostly local to the smooth muscle, but it doesn’t *exclusively* target PDE-5. What you might find with 100mg is that is doesn’t work any better than perhaps 25 or 50mg, but the side effects become greater. For anyone taking blood pressure meds it’s probably a big no no.Either way it makes much more sense to start out low and see how you get on with it.
Viagra is not a no-no for those of us who are hypertensive and take meds for it.
The story of Pfizer’s Viagra is interesting in this light. It was originally designed to be an anti-hypertension drug. During field trials of Viagra the supervising doctors and chemists were very disappointed to find that it was lousy at lowering blood pressure; it only did so by a relatively small degree of both systolic and diastolic.
However, men in the trials were reporting that they were getting frequent and firm erections. Pfizer very quickly realized the potential bonanza and changed their entire focus on their new drug: it became an erection pill instead of the B/P med it was designed to be.
Normally, men who are hypertensive can combine their anti-hypertension drugs with Viagra with no ill effect. Men who are _hypo_-tensive, with very low blood pressure, need to be especially careful in taking this drug.