Prozac® For Premature Ejaculation: Is It Effective?
If you sometimes struggle with premature ejaculation, you may have heard from a healthcare provider (or even just the internet): one of the best ways to treat PE may be a type of prescription you don’t associate with sexual medicine. The medication in question? Antidepressants.
While it sounds a little suspicious, there’s plenty of randomized clinical trial research, placebo-controlled study data and other research out there showing that Prozac can be an effective treatment when you’re finishing too quickly.
If you want to know how it works, you could wade through DOI studies, PubMed and Google Scholar articles and a whole lot of full-text reports from academic journals trying to figure out if studies should be double blind — or you could just let us walk you through them.
Below, we’ve covered how ProzacⓇ works, how they can address premature ejaculation (PE) and what to know about taking them safely. We’ve also thrown in some alternatives, in case your quest to delay ejaculation isn’t ready for pharmacologic options quite yet.
What Is Prozac (Fluoxetine)?
Prozac is the brand name of fluoxetine — a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, or SSRI.
SSRIs like Prozac increase the amount of serotonin available in your brain, so that it has a constant supply for helping to impact your mood and managing happiness, anxiety and other feelings.
Prozac is currently only approved by the Food and Drug Administration for:
Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)
Bulimia nervosa
It’s often used off-label for other purposes (more on that in a moment).
When used as directed, it’s a safe and effective medication with manageable adverse effects — and can give you more than one kind of relief.
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Does Prozac Work to Treat Premature Ejaculation?
Here’s the low-down: Prozac wasn’t designed for treating premature ejaculation, but put simply, scientific research shows that fluoxetine, the active ingredient in Prozac, is effective as a treatment for PE.
Specifically, some research suggests it’s effective at slowing down your orgasm and ejaculation processes.
A 2009 study in the Journal of Sex Medicine (AKA J Sex Med) looked at 130 men using 20mg fluoxetine for PE. Although many of the men stopped using fluoxetine within a year, researchers did find that the percentage of men rating their ejaculatory control as “poor” decreased from 98 percent to 41 percent. Both personal and partner distress also decreased.
A study of 100 men published in the journal Therapeutics and Clinical Risk Management (which is just as much fun to read as it sounds) compared fluoxetine to the SSRIs escitalopram and paroxetine, and found similarly positive results.
A third study from the International Brazilian Journal of Urology compared fluoxetine, sertraline, paroxetine and citalopram (all types of antidepressants), concluding they were all effective in treating PE. They also found that men using fluoxetine increased their intravaginal ejaculatory latency time (IELT) by as much as five minutes.
Experts believe that Prozac’s effectiveness as a treatment for premature ejaculation is related to the link between serotonin levels and ejaculation.
How to Use Fluoxetine for Premature Ejaculation
There’s no official, FDA-approved Prozac dosage for PE, because Prozac isn’t officially approved by the FDA as a treatment for premature ejaculation.
When it is prescribed off-label, though, there are some guidelines your healthcare provider will use. A common fluoxetine dosage for treating PE is 20mg per day.
Side Effects of Prozac for Premature Ejaculation
Prozac and generic fluoxetine are very safe and effective PE treatments, though side effects are possible for anyone using this medication.
Common side effects of Prozac include:
Anxiety
Diarrhea
Decreased libido
Dry mouth
Indigestion
Impotence (erectile dysfunction)
Insomnia
Nausea
Although it’s uncommon, Prozac and other SSRIs have the capacity to cause more serious side effects that affect your behavior and/or mental state.
You’ll want to make sure to share other medications you use with a healthcare professional, so you can avoid potentially dangerous Prozac interactions.
Check out our guides to side effects of Prozac and other antidepressant side effects if you want to know more.
Alternatives to Fluoxetine for PE
There are other ways to address PE without fluoxetine, including other medications, techniques and topical anesthetic products.
Alternative PE treatments include:
Topical treatments treat PE by numbing or reducing the sensitivity of your penis, which makes finishing more difficult. Products with lidocaine, benzocaine or prilocaine are safe and effective, and the easy-to-use ones like our Delay Spray and Clockstopper Wipes are also convenient to carry around when your plans are less predictable.
Other SSRIs like sertraline, paroxetine and escitalopram can have beneficial effects similar to fluoxetine, as we mentioned above.
ED medications like sildenafil (the active ingredient in Viagra®) and Cialis® (tadalafil) have been occasionally shown to have a small positive impact on ejaculation time, though studies are ongoing.
Techniques and exercises, like the start-stop, squeeze technique and others can potentially help you control ejaculation.
Therapy and counseling can help with the psychological aspects of PE. There’s some evidence that behavioral therapy techniques can prolong sex and some research shows that combining therapy and medication can be even more effective. Our full guide to stopping premature ejaculation has more details.
Lifestyle changes like exercising and reducing your daily stress may improve sexual performance, especially if you haven’t been taking care of yourself.
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Prozac for Premature Ejaculation: Takeaways
Whether you have lifelong premature ejaculation or your sexual satisfaction and time to ejaculation have both taken a sudden, dramatic downturn, feeling self-conscious is understandable — that’s true of any type of sexual dysfunction, even those with a high prevalence like PE.
But you don’t need to feel that way — there are plenty of interventions, treatments and on-demand tools for addressing PE. The bad news is that there’s still a lot of work to be done to perfect those treatment options.
The treatment of PE is a bit of a work in progress. Urologists who understand that your sexual intercourse features are ending up like shorts want to give you all the sexual health care and support that you need, but options for treatment of premature ejaculation are still being tested and clarified by researchers.
Here’s the situation now:
The connection between Prozac and premature ejaculation is an ongoing topic. Studies, systematic reviews and meta-analysis research have all tentatively shown that Prozac and other SSRIs can delay orgasm and increase ejaculation latency for men with PE.
Although Prozac isn’t approved by the FDA as a treatment for premature ejaculation, it may be prescribed off-label for the increase of intravaginal ejaculation latency time.
Other options for treating premature ejaculation include lifestyle changes, ED medications and our Delay Spray for Men, which is formulated with lidocaine to reduce sensitivity without being overly numbing.
Want to know more about Prozac? Our guides to Prozac uses include information on Prozac for anxiety, depression and more.
We also have guides to how to prevent PE and last longer in bed to help you sort through the options available to you right now.
Want to increase the baseline of how long you last? Put down the stopwatch and reach out to a professional today.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. The information contained herein is not a substitute for and should never be relied upon for professional medical advice. Always talk to your doctor about the risks and benefits of any treatment or medication.
