If You Take Too Much Erectile Dysfunction Medication, Here's What You May See
A case report detailed how a 31-year-old man started seeing multi-colored flashes
Sure, you may want things to be flashy in bed. But maybe not in this way.
A case report published previously in the medical journal Retinal Cases and Brief Reports detailed how a 31-year-old man started seeing multi-colored flashes after taking an erectile dysfunction (ED) medication. Now, the man did purchase the liquid form of sildenafil citrate, which is the generic name for Viagra, over the Internet. Plus, he drank the medication straight from the bottle without bothering to measure how much he had consumed. So, one could say that “smart decision-making” wasn’t exactly the standing phrase in this case. Nevertheless, this case report was a reminder that ED medications can affect your eyes in different ways. That can be the case even when you take such medications properly.
The man in the case report started seeing multi-colored flashes shortly after he had ingested the medication. His eyes grew sensitive to light, and everything he looked at seemed to have a red tint. He continued to experience symptoms (the flashes eventually stopped) for two days before going to the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai urgent care clinic. In the case report, Fatoumata Yanoga, MD, Ronald C. Gentile, MD, Toco Y. P. Chui, PhD, K. Bailey Freund, MD, Millie Fell, MD, FACS, Rosa Dolz-Marco, MD, PhD, and Richard B. Rosen, MD described what then happened.
Testing including adaptive optics (AO) and optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging technology revealed that certain photoreceptors in his retina were damaged. Photoreceptors are cells in the retina, which is in the back of your eyes. As described in PubMed Health, photoreceptors absorb and convert light into electrical signals that then subsequently travel through your optic nerve to your brain where they eventually become the images that you see.
The Mount Sinai doctors found damage to his cone photoreceptors, one of two types of photoreceptors in your retina. Cones sit in the center part of your retina and help you see fine detail and color. The other type of photoreceptors are rods, which sit along the outer part of your retina and help you see in dim and dark light. Therefore, it is not surprising that damage to the cones would result in a red tint. Unfortunately, the red tint has persisted for over a year, despite steroid treatments, suggesting that this visual disturbance may be permanent.
Even when taking sildenafil citrate at recommended doses, you may experience temporary visual symptoms such as blurry vision, sensitivity to light, or color changes like a blueish tint. What do your real eyes have to do with a medication that is supposed to act on something that’s been called the one-eyed…umm, you know the saying? Well, think hard about how the medications lead to erections. They cause blood vessels to dilate so that more blood rushes into your friend down there. But such medications don’t just affect the blood flow to your penis. They can alter the blood flow to other parts of your body such as your retina and optic nerve. And temporarily messing with blood flow to those parts can temporarily mess with the functioning of cells in your retina. Hence the transient visual disturbances that some people have experienced with such medications.
However, this case report did show that the resulting visual disturbances could be permanent or at least much longer than transient when you take more than the recommended dosage. Granted, the man in the case report did order the ED medication over the Internet. And, when you order medications over the Internet, surprise, surprise, you can’t always tell whether what you are getting is the real deal and whether it includes other ingredients and contaminants may have been included.
That’s why you shouldn’t treat ED medications like you would Skittles. If you think you do need ED medications, talk to your doctor to make sure that such medications are appropriate for you and follow whatever instructions the doctor and the medication packaging provide. Hammers and surfboards may be OK to buy casually over the Internet, but medications require extra caution. You may not end up liking what you see.