Viagra News (2005)

Erectile Dysfunction Drugs May Cause Vision Loss

Date: December 8, 2005

Public citizens representing more than 135,000 people in the United States as consumers submitted a petition to the Food and Drug Administration, USA regarding the addition of the immediate warning of adding a black box with the message that erectile dysfunction drugs like the PDE5 inhibitor medicines such as Viagra, Cialis and Levitra can harm a person's vision permanently.

The label for Revatio, a version of Sildenafil indicated for pulmonary arterial hypertension, should also be included in the changes recommended in the petition, according to Public Citizen. Viagra accounts for nineteen percent of the total cases of ischemic optic neuropathy in the FDA's adverse event database, more than 2-fold higher than that for the next most frequently-cited drug; NAION first came to public attention on May 27, 2005, when the FDA announced that it was in discussions with Pfizer to update its Viagra label to mention loss of vision. In the March 2005, researchers at the University of Minnesota described in the Journal of Neuro-Ophthalmology seven new cases of NAION apparently linked to the use of Viagra.