Most men who choose to buy cheap sildenafil online only have one thing on their mind, but there are many broader benefits from the drug.

At a time when conspiracy theorists everywhere are trying to claim that the Covid vaccines pose a range of dangerous side-effects – and if there were no pandemic many of them would just be saying the same about other vaccinations and treatments – the fact is that using viagra-based medications can actually have positive benefits beyond the most obvious one.

For example, a new study by The Cleveland Clinic, published in the American journal Nature Aging, found that Sildenafil shows clear signs of reducing instances of Alzheimer’s disease.

An analysis of seven million patients found that the risk of becoming a sufferer from the degenerative brain condition was lowered by 69 per cent, suggesting that the drug does more than just provide an opportunity to create more good memories, as it can help preserve those that people already have.

Speaking about the findings, research team leader Feixong Cheng said the “interplay” between amyloid proteins and tau proteins was a “greater contributor” to Alzheimer’s than either proteins on their own, and that Sildenafil helped inhibit their capacity to work together by targeting the “molecular network intersection” of endophenotypes.

If all that sounds like complex scientific language, the simple explanation is that Sildenafil stops them from working together to do more damage than they could alone.

Another extraordinary finding was that Sildenafil could help save the lives of Covid patients.

Monica Almeida, a 37-year-old nurse who contracted the virus in November, was placed in an induced coma and put on Oxygen as the disease took hold.

Doctors at the County Hospital in Lincoln treated her with the drug after weeks in intensive care, during which time her parents had been told to fly in from Portugal to say goodbye to their daughter.

Instead, Sildenafil enabled her blood vessels to open up, reducing her need for oxygen by 50 per cent. She was not only able to come out of the coma but was allowed to go home on Christmas Eve. 

Ms Almeida, a married mother of two living in Gainsborough, had signed an agreement to allow experimental drugs to be tried on her. She described her survival and recovery as her own “Christmas miracle”.

Of course, none of this means that those buying Sildenafil for their erectile dysfunction condition should be using it to treat Covid if they have just tested positive; after all, this may not be necessary, especially for Omicron variant sufferers who will tend to have milder symptoms that need treating with paracetamol.

At the same time, a succession of studies linking Covid with erectile dysfunction have indicated that the effects of the virus are the reverse of the benefits of Sildenafil; one causes blood vessels to be inflamed and thus narrower, while the other opens them up. That means the drug could have a long term benefit in battling the effects of the coronavirus beyond saving lives in ICU units.