Potent Medicine
Can Viagra and other lifestyle drugs save lives?
By Ben Harder
The test for the boys and girls was simple: to cover as much ground as they could in 6 minutes. But these children, ages 5 to 18, had pulmonary hypertension—high blood pressure in their lungs from constricted blood vessels. Such kids “don’t have a lot of energy,” explains pediatric cardiologist Tilman Humpl. “They can’t exercise at all. They may not be able to walk up from the basement to the first floor.”
During the test, the 14 children walked, on average, 278 meters, about half of what a healthy young person would walk at a comfortable pace. But 6 months later, after treatment with an experimental drug, the same kids averaged 443 meters during the time. “That’s a huge increase for a patient with that disorder,” says Humpl, of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.