ED and Stopping Smoking: Does It Help?

It’s old news that smoking causes erectile dysfunction (ED). So the advice doctors give to men suffering ED is to stop smoking.

Simple, right?

Well not quite, because a new study published in Translational Andrology and Urology reveals just how long men have to stop smoking until their love life is back on track.

And what they can do to speed things up.

The researchers obtained 40 eight-week-old male Sprague Dawley rats and divided them into four groups. Ten were exposed to room air only and served as the control group.

The remaining 30 received the same amount of smoke as passive smokers do for 12 weeks after which they were divided into the three remaining groups:

– a smoking group of 10 that immediately underwent ED testing,
– 10 that were first exposed to room air for four weeks before ED testing, and
– 10 that received room air for eight weeks before the ED testing.

They evaluated the rats’ ED by testing their intracavernous pressure (the pressure in the spongy tissue of the penis) and their mean arterial pressure (their blood pressure). For ideal sexual function, the former should be high, while the latter should be low.

The intracavernous pressure was lower, the arterial pressure was higher, and the ratio between the two was lower in the smoking group than in the groups that received only room air or room air for eight weeks after smoking cessation.

This indicates that eight weeks of room air after 12 weeks of smoking can undo much of the damage of the smoking. Four weeks of clean air is not quite enough but is preferable to continuing smoking.

So how long do you need to stop smoking before seeing this huge benefit, which is almost comparable to people who have never smoked?

If this rat study translates directly to humans, a week in a rat’s life corresponds to approximately 26.6 weeks of a human lifespan, on the assumption that a long life expectancy for a rat is three years and for a human is 80 years.

In other words, if you smoked for six years, you might need to stop smoking for at least four years to reset your sex life.

But whether or not you smoke, you can gain rock-hard stamina as soon as today using the simple home exercises explained here…