14 DAY TRIAL // You know those teen comedies in which boys are very eager to find methods of boosting sexual drive of the girls in the parties?
Well, that seems to be much simpler than thought, as caffeine gets females in the mood for sex.
In a study, female rats that ingested caffeine before mating were quicker than not caffeinated females to enjoy another hanky-spanky moment.
"It looks as if they wanted to have sex again," said researcher Fay Guarraci, an assistant professor of psychology at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas.
So, could caffeine boost up women's sex lives?
"Maybe, but it's too early to say." "My caution in terms of directly applying the caffeine or the coffee before sex to enhance your sexual drive or motivation would be that in this experiment, we gave only one dose of caffeine to animals who had never had caffeine before," Guarraci says.
"Most of the time, women drink coffee on a daily basis or ingest caffeine in cola beverages," she observes.
"It would be interesting to see if regular caffeine use had the same effect on female rats," Guarraci says.
The current study's results "might be something to think about for women who don't ingest a lot of caffeine, who usually have a low level of caffeine in their diet."
"In humans, it might enhance the sexual experience only among people who are not habitual users."
In the study, the caffeinated females "would go and visit faster, and they would stay with the males until they received sexual stimulation before they left," Guarraci says.
"It wasn't just that they wanted to be around them. It seemed to be particularly relevant to the sexual interaction, the stimulation they would receive," Guarraci says.
The researchers checked several caffeine doses in 108 female rats, based on the rats' weight.
The caffeine shortened the amount of time it took the females to return to males after a first romp, indicating they were more motivated to do it again.
Interestingly, the female rats that received the middle dose of caffeine had quicker return visits to the males than the highest dose tested.
Rats' elaborate courtship behavior is very similar to most mammals, including the human one.
"The female seems to control the mating encounter," Guarraci says.
"So when a male and a female rat are ready to mate, the female does all the gatekeeping for the male. She decides when it's time for him to mate, in the wild as well as in the lab," Guarraci says.
"The female, when she's interested, she'll go visit a male. But then when she's not interested in him anymore or wants to take a break, she runs away. To me, it seems a little bit like the playing hard-to-get with the male rats," she continues.
Ultimately, the research team wants to depict the chemistry and brain structures involved in sexual motivation for mammals, including people.
"There are a lot of women out there with sexual dysfunction, and if they understood how that happens or how we can augment that, that would be a helpful thing," Guarraci says.
"Understanding the circuits that control this behavior will help us understand how the brain works and what part of the brain mediates motivation because sexual behavior is a motivative behavior."