Nick NorwitzMD PhD, Oxford-Harvard | Metabolic Health Educator | “Stay Curious”

The Alzheimer’s Pill No One Expected… Viagra?!

22 Nov 2025 · 1 min

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0:43

In this brief presentation, the speaker highlights a recent Nature Aging paper that examined roughly 7 million individuals and found that Viagra use was linked to a 69 % lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease compared to non‑users. The speaker emphasizes the unusually large effect size and notes that the researchers performed multiple robustness checks—including comparator analyses with other drugs and several subgroup analyses—to control for confounding factors. These checks consistently reproduced the strong protective association, and the effect was also observed in women, underscoring the potential broad relevance of the finding.

Chapters

Viagra might prevent Alzheimer's disease. And yes, I'm dead serious. A paper published in Nature Aging found that in an analysis of 7 million people, Viagra was associated with a 69% reduced risk of Alzheimer's disease compared to non-Viagra users. And that percentage is not a joke. Those are actually the data. And yes, it's a big effect size. And in this case, size does matter. What's more, to reduce confounders, the researchers conducted comparator analyses with other drugs and did they did several subgroup analyses, and the results were the same every time. The effects were consistent and large, and there was even an effect in women.