Drug for pedophiles to be tested in Swedish trial

[Deleted]

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/...hilic-impulses

Swedish researchers have started a clinical trial to assess whether a prostate cancer drug could help prevent pedophilic behavior—and they're counting on online donations to help finish it.

The team is reaching out to the public to collect £38,000 ($53,000) through a campaign launched today on Walacea, a U.K. crowdfunding website for scientific research. They hope to show that the drug, which lowers testosterone levels in the body, will reduce the pedophilic impulses that might cause people to abuse a child. So far, the researchers have recruited “four or five” participants, but they ultimately aim to enroll 60 men, the trial's principal investigator, Christoffer Rahm, said at a press briefing to announce the campaign in London on Wednesday.

The trial will not enroll sex offenders, said Rahm, a psychiatric researcher at the Karolinska Institute (KI) near Stockholm; on the contrary, the project “wants to shift the focus [to] preventing child sexual abuse from happening in the first place” by targeting men who have sought help to deal with their pedophilic impulses.

The trial participants are recruited through Preventell, a Swedish “helpline for unwanted sexuality” run by the Centre for Andrology and Sexual Medicine at the Karolinska University Hospital. Since it was set up in 2012, the helpline has received about 1500 phone calls from men seeking such help, said the center's director, Stefan Arver. This proves that “people with these thoughts really want help,” he said.

The drug that the team will test is called Firmagon, also known as Degarelix in its injectable form. It belongs to a class called Gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) antagonists, meaning that the drug competes with the body's natural GnRH and binds to its receptors in the brain, which ultimately blocks the production of testosterone in the testes. Currently, the drug—a form of "chemical castration"—is approved only to treat prostate cancer.

Other types of medicines are already prescribed—and sometimes mandated by law—to treat sexual offenders, including other drugs that change testosterone levels and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, a class of antidepressants. But some of these drugs are only effective after several months, and their use is “based on very weak evidence,” Niklas Långström, a psychiatric epidemiologist at KI, said at the press conference.

This is in part because research in this area is rife with complex ethical issues. Doctors who discover that patients have committed a criminal offense, such as downloading child pornography, must often report them to the police, so “few people will come forward” to seek help, said forensic psychiatrist Donald Grubin from Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. The use of placebos in randomized controlled trials, the gold standard in drug testing, raises questions as well. “Ethics committees don’t look kindly on giving sugar pills to potential offenders,” Grubin said.

Swedish regulators did sign off on a controlled study, however; the KI team plans to give half of the participants a placebo, whereas the other half will receive the drug. To assess its effect, potentially “just 2 weeks after injection and lasting 3 months,” the team will use a series of existing tests to measure three parameters: high sexual arousal, self-regulation, and empathy. Testosterone is involved in regulating these three “most important risk factors for committing repeated sexual abuse,” Rahm said. The study will not measure possible long-term effects on actual criminal offending.

Rahm says he opted for crowdfunding because public funding and a contribution from a private foundation fell short, while the team wanted to remain independent from the drug's manufacturer, Ferring Pharmaceuticals. The funds collected will help pay for the drugs, the salary of a research nurse, and functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments.

The trial is part of a broader project that will also search for genetic, neurological, and hormonal markers linked with a risk of acting on pedophilic impulses. Any markers the team may find would likely not be used to screen potential abusers, Rahm says, but rather to identify people most likely to respond well to treatment, or to confirm a psychiatric assessment.

Most currently used testosterone regulators are GnRH agonists, which stimulate GnRH receptors rather than blocking them, causing an initial surge in testosterone production before lowering the hormone's levels in the body. They are often used to treat prostate cancer in men or to suppress spontaneous ovulation in women undergoing fertility treatment. These drugs “take months to have any effect and the initial flare […] is not something you want in the acute phase”—the period when a person with pedophilic disorder is most at risk to act on his impulses, Rahm says. As a GnRH antagonist, Firmagon doesn't have these downsides.

Thoughts on this?

[Deleted]

I guess some people need to eat pills like cereals instead of doing the good ol' self control.

[Deleted]

Well, looks like at least one country puts the focus on the right front :P

If the drug actually works, and is effective. It could do so much good.

Having been to a few courses on stuff like this. Pedophilia seems to be one of the worse things, a person can have.
This would not only reduce a lot of horrible things. But it would also bring some sort of peace, for the people suffering from it.
The problem with a lot of countries, is that the subject is so taboo. So they don't invest much into actually trying to prevent it.
They do strike down when the action has been taken. But at that point, the damage has been done.

[Super Friendly Kitty Cat]

Sweden leading the charge to create drugs that lower the testosterone in males?

Color me shocked.

[Deleted]

Sweden leading the charge to create drugs that lower the testosterone in males?

Color me shocked.

So every Swede is becoming a low energy cuck?

[Total Crica]

Could be very unethical if used wrongly and under the wrong circumstances.

everything could be unethical if used wrongly, that is not a reason to not use something

[Bakis]

Could be very unethical if used wrongly and under the wrong circumstances.

So can a prescripted head ache pill.
Not sure what your point is.

[Deleted]

Sounds a bit like the chemical castration that was used on gay people (eg: Alan Turning, below quoted from wikipedia):

Turing was convicted and given a choice between imprisonment and probation, which would be conditional on his agreement to undergo hormonal treatment designed to reduce libido.

He accepted the option of treatment via injections of what was then called stilboestrol (now known as diethylstilbestrol or DES), a synthetic oestrogen; this treatment was continued for the course of one year.

The treatment rendered Turing impotent and caused gynaecomastia, fulfilling in the literal sense Turing's prediction that "no doubt I shall emerge from it all a different man, but quite who I've not found out".

[Bakis]

The point is exactly that.

Low libido people will see no wrong in excessively applying "chemical castrations" like these to everyone and everything.

First there has to be established that there is a high risk of it being used unethical.
Prescribed to everyone and everything does not cut it.

[Cephilia]

Sounds great. Currently there's very little help to be offered to people who are scared of their own sexuality and feel they might commit a crime, even if they are brave enough to ask for it. Obviously this kind of treatment would have to be concensual, but I can see it being offered as a part of a lowered sentence in milder cases of pedophilic crimes, like small amounts of child porn. Obviously distribution of child porn or sexual assault on a child should still carry full sentences, treatment or no treatment.

[Super Friendly Kitty Cat]

Sounds great. Currently there's very little help to be offered to people who are scared of their own sexuality and feel they might commit a crime, even if they are brave enough to ask for it. Obviously this kind of treatment would have to be concensual, but I can see it being offered as a part of a lowered sentence in milder cases of pedophilic crimes, like small amounts of child porn. Obviously distribution of child porn or sexual assault on a child should still carry full sentences, treatment or no treatment.

You want to continue to criminalize someone's sexuality?

I thought we were passed that with Gay, Lesbian, and Trans-gendered rights.

[Sierra85]

i don't think there can be a cure besides two bullets in the back of the neck.

[Super Friendly Kitty Cat]

i don't think there can be a cure besides two bullets in the back of the neck.

Which is what ignorant rednecks used to say about Gays, Lesbians and Trans-gendered people.

It is shocking that views like yours are not infracted.

[Deleted]

i don't think there can be a cure besides two bullets in the back of the neck.

Amen, brother.

[Bakis]

I really wonder how they will test this.
Do they have a control group that doesn't use the drug? I'm not sure any of those would admit any crimes.

But it's good that they are removing the taboo and actually try to do something about it.
The current way of handling this is disgusting and puts both adults and children in danger.

I thought the remedy was to kill every phedodphile and probably criminals too at least the redneck squad think it is.

[Deleted]

I thought the remedy was to kill every phedodphile and probably criminals too at least the redneck squad think it is.

Was this a part of your plan?

[nextormento]

Sweden was never too shy about eugenics.
I'm not surprised that they'd consider practices with similar ethical concerns.

[Al Gorefiend]

Sounds great. Currently there's very little help to be offered to people who are scared of their own sexuality and feel they might commit a crime, even if they are brave enough to ask for it. Obviously this kind of treatment would have to be concensual, but I can see it being offered as a part of a lowered sentence in milder cases of pedophilic crimes, like small amounts of child porn. Obviously distribution of child porn or sexual assault on a child should still carry full sentences, treatment or no treatment.

You bring up a very good point I'd like to reflect off of. Pedophiles aren't pedophiles by choice, they didn't randomly watch porn one day and think "you know what would be great? If there was a kid in this". It's a sexuality in the same sense (but unquestionably more severe) that being gay is. These people shouldn't be given the same sexual freedom the LGBT community enjoys absolutely not, but being vilified, burned at the stake and having their lives absolutely ruined beyond social repair by the system isn't solving the problem and makes people who start feeling pedophilic urges abso-fucking-lutely TERRIFIED of seeking psychological treatment. Everytime I see "kill that sick pedophile he's a worthless piece of filth" I shake my head...

These people need to be helped. Rehab for pedophiles, if you will. Get them while they're simply pedophiles before they become statutory rapists or full-blown predators.

[Krille]

Considering the fact that pedophilia is something you can't control, much like homosexuality (but 100% more damning because it's hard to have a relationship with a child right) i'm all for this. People with pedophilia struggle with living their lives normally, It's fucking horrific seeing people in this thread that wants to "put a bullet in their necks", you know there are "pedophiles" that don't act upon it? That live their life in shame? I can only assume the pills are directed towards those people.

[Independent voter]

Sweden is like a big test tube for the rest of the world. Thanks guys.