Tracleer and PPH News
Sildenafil Citrate Drug Gives Girl New Hope
By Dan Hinkel
Gazette Staff
January 23, 2006 - If you need proof that life is both beautiful and absurd, meet 6-year-old Alexis Rodriguez.
The 31-pound girl with gleaming silver baby teeth and eyes like little brown globes has the energy to run home from school, possibly because she takes a drug formulated to give men a boost.
"I think it's her miracle," said her mother Cheri Hoffman, 28.
Rodriguez has taken liquid sildenafil citrate-the active ingredient in the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra-for a few months to treat secondary pulmonary hypertension, a lung condition caused by a heart defect.
That defect has brought Rodriguez into contact with too many scalpels and tubes.
Doctors have prescribed Viagra for six-year-old Alexis Rodriguez, who has a serious lung condition caused by a heart defect. The drug, commonly used to treat erectile dysfunction in men, appears to be giving the child increased energy and stamina.
Doctors haven't always had hope for Rodriguez, said godmother Kristine Ludeman.
Rodriguez has flown in the medical transport helicopter that signifies the worst kind of good news: You're alive, but not by much.
"About two years ago, they said two years," Ludeman said, noting that Rodriguez is now among those who have outlived doctors' expectations.
In November 2004, her lung condition caused a buildup of pressure near her heart that could have required a lung transplant that might have extended Rodriguez's life only a few years, Hoffman said.
Then Hoffman discovered that cardiologist Stuart Berger of Children's Hospital of Wisconsin in Milwaukee would prescribe Viagra to relieve symptoms of the condition.
Hope in the therapy isn't misplaced, although the data isn't complete as to whether Viagra could be an effective long-term solution, Berger said.
"It certainly is a treatment that has some promise," he said.
Rodriguez's condition causes a pressurizing jam-up of blood flow. Without getting too graphic, Viagra's main mission also involves liberating blood flow.
The drug is working for Rodriguez, Hoffman said.
"Ever since she's had it, she's had energy," Hoffman said.
Before the treatment, she couldn't walk to Lincoln Elementary School, which is nearly in the backyard of her family's south side ranch home.
"She was actually running ahead of us the other day," Hoffman said.
Indeed, Rodriguez's personality is a cocktail of coyness and mania.
She is not above insisting that her mother call a Janesville Gazette reporter to tell him what she forgot to say earlier: that she likes art and movies.
Rodriguez's real baby teeth were destroyed by a condition that keeps her from holding food down. Now her skin, colored like cream-filled coffee, is accented with a mouth full of silver.
A problem with her palate shaves the hard consonants in her speech.
"Me hoo!" she said after Hoffman said she was studying to be a nurse.
"I just want her to be able to run with her peers," Hoffman said.
"Frens!" Rodriguez said, in a meaningful correction.
Hoffman hopes Viagra treatment turns out to be a lasting solution for her daughter.
Berger confirmed that Rodriguez's improvement is a hopeful sign, but he still needs to know if her increased energy corresponds with an improvement in her medical condition.
"It would be nice to know that for sure," he said.
Rodriguez felt a lot of hope Sunday, too, related to an impending trip to Chuck E. Cheese.
Hope means a lot of different things.
"I really have a lot of hope," Hoffman said.
"I think we might be finding our miracle."
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