Taking Your Erections to Heart
Can problems with getting an erection be a sign of another larger problem that could cause you serious problems?
Erectile dysfunction [ED] can be a sign of underlying car-diovascular problems.
Erections can be a sign of things to come.
It can be an early warning, in that respect. The advent of natural sexual energy formulas has put the spotlight back on ED, and a series of studies are suggest-ing that, for most men, the condition has physical and not just mental beginnings.
Early in 2004, researchers published a study showing that the arteries of men with ED expanded less efficiently than men without erectile difficulties — a possible sign of un-derlying heart disease.
You can liken ED to a common plumbing problem: If you turn on your kitchen faucet and you don’t get any flow, either the faucets are broken or the pipes are clogged. For men with advanced heart disease, the clogged-pipe explanation probably holds true, since buildup of choles-terol in arteries can greatly reduce blood flow. But many men with ED aren’t anywhere near this stage of cardiovascular deterioration.
For them, the faucet — the vessels inside the penis and the smooth muscle around them — may be broken on a biochemical level. As blood flow demands increase (as happens during an erection), the endothelium releases nitric oxide to help trigger blood vessel expansion.
Blood flow is very important for normal erectile function. It’s also — and here’s the link to heart disease — very im-portant as an anti-atherosclerotic agent, resisting hardening of the arteries.
In that sense, ED may serve as an early signal that blood vessels elsewhere in the body aren’t expanding as they should either.
