A male contraceptive pill has been developed which is effective, safe and does not harm sex drive, scientists have announced. 
 
 In what has been described as a “major step forward”, the drug was successfully tested on 83 men for a month for the first time. 
 
 So far efforts to create a once-daily pill to mimic the mainstream female contraceptive have stalled because men metabolise and clear out the hormones it delivers too quickly. ||||| Scientists behind contraceptive say they have overcome hurdles that have stalled development 
 
 A male pill could be on the horizon after early trials showed a once-daily tablet was safe and appeared to work, according to researchers. 
 
 
 
 The quest to develop a male contraceptive pill has been long and fraught. Men who want a reversible form of contraception have said in surveys that they would prefer a pill to injections or gels, which are also being developed. 
 
 The new pill is known by the chemical name dimethandrolone undecanoate, or DMAU. Like most female contraceptive pills, it contains a combination of hormones – an androgen such as testosterone, and a progestin. 
 
 Women have had enough of the pill. So why foist it on men? | Nichi Hodgson Read more 
 
 “DMAU is a major step forward in the development of a once-daily ‘male pill’,” said Stephanie Page, a professor of medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle, and the senior investigator on the study. The team have overcome previous problems that assailed developers of male hormonal pills, she believes. 
 
 One of those was the tendency of available forms of testosterone to cause liver inflammation. Also, because they clear the body relatively quickly, men would have had to take the pills twice a day. 
 
 The team, presenting their results at the Endocrine Society’s annual conference in Chicago, have added in the long-chain fatty acid undecanoate, which slows down the clearance of the hormone from the body, meaning one pill a day should be enough. 
 
 It is still early days, but the team believe the results from their safety trial in 100 men are promising. Of the 100 volunteers aged 18-50, 83 completed the month-long study, including giving blood samples for hormone and cholesterol testing at the beginning and end. 
 
 Different doses of the pill and different formulations were tested at university medical centres in Washington state and California. Each dose group included five men who were randomly assigned to receive an inactive placebo and another 12 to 15 men who were given the new pill. 
 
 Volunteers took the drug or placebo for 28 days once daily with food. DMAU must be taken with food to be effective, said Page. 
 
 What happened to the male contraceptive pill? Read more 
 
 At the highest dose tested, 400mg, there was “marked suppression” of the hormones required for sperm production, she said. 
 
 Low testosterone levels can lead to loss of sex drive and fatigue, but most of those on the trial did not appear to suffer. “Despite having low levels of circulating testosterone, very few subjects reported symptoms consistent with testosterone deficiency or excess,” Page said. 
 
 However, all the men taking the male pill had weight gain and a drop in their HDL or good cholesterol levels. But Page said this was mild and not a reason for concern, and that liver and kidney function was good. 
 
 “These promising results are unprecedented in the development of a prototype male pill,” Page said. “Longer-term studies are currently under way to confirm that DMAU taken every day blocks sperm production.” ||||| Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. 
 
 / Updated By Maggie Fox 
 
 The latest effort to come up with a male birth control pill has found a formulation that appears to be safe. 
 
 But the experimental pill has at least one of the same problems that plague female birth control pills: it caused the men to gain weight. And after just a few weeks of testing, it’s also not yet clear how well it works. 
 
 Even though the researchers said they were “very excited” by the results, they haven’t been testing it long enough to show whether it decreases sperm production, and they haven’t shown whether it stops couples from conceiving. 
 
 Nonetheless, it may be the best hope yet for a non-permanent male contraceptive, said Stephanie Page of the University of Washington School of Medicine. 
 
 “Our last great advance in male contraception was 300 years ago with the development of the condom,” Page told a news conference. 
 
 The pill Page’s team tested is called dimethandrolone undecanoate (DMAU) and it‘s tweaked version of previous failed efforts to develop a male pill. It is being developed with funding from the National Institutes of Health. 
 
 The last big hope for a male birth control pill fell apart in 2016 when the drug was shown to damage the liver. It also required two doses a day.”It’s hard enough to remember to take a pill once a day,” Page said. 
 
 Her team tested 100 male volunteers and came up with good results from 82 of them. Some got sugar pills and the rest got varying doses of DMAU. 
 
 “Individuals on all the doses had remarkably low testosterone levels,” Page said. And the levels recovered within days of stopping the pills, the team told a meeting in Chicago of the Endocrine Society. 
 
 Related: Cancer drug affects sperm count 
 
 More importantly, there were no major side-effects. “Despite testosterone levels that were very low, the men had no symptoms,” Page said. “No hot flashes — the men had normal mood,” she added. 
 
 “We did see some mild weight gain and a little bit of a change in cholesterol levels,” she added. The men gained between 3 and 9 pounds, and their HDL or “good” cholesterol levels fell slightly, something that might, over time, raise heart disease risk. 
 
 Plus the pills must be taken with food or they won’t work. 
 
 The next step is to see if the pills decrease sperm production. The team is starting that trial now that they’ve shown the drug is safe in the short term. Then they’ll have to test it in men who are married or in other long-term relationships with women. 
 
 “Our last great advance in male contraception was 300 years ago with the development of the condom." 
 
 DMAU works by interrupting the signal between the brain and the testicles, Page said. “Testosterone production is blocked and therefore sperm are not able to finish their last stages of maturation,” she said. 
 
 One big question has always been whether men would actually take a birth control pill reliably, since they’re not the ones who bear the burden of pregnancy. 
 
 “We’re often asked if there was a contraceptive if men would be interested in using it,” Page said. 
 
 “There has been very nice work in this area demonstrating that men across the globe — various races, ethnicities and across socioeconomic groups — are actually very interested in contraception,” she added. “And 60 to 80 percent of men surveyed in such studies say if there was a reversible contraceptive available, they would be very interested in using it.” ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites.
– After years of intrigue, researchers are celebrating "a major step forward" for the male birth control pill. A month-long clinical trial shows a once-daily male pill is safe and effective at suppressing the hormones needed for sperm production, and has no negative effect on sex drive, according to researchers who presented their findings Sunday at the Endocrine Society's annual conference in Chicago, per the Telegraph. The hormone pill, dimethandrolone undecanoate (DMAU), overcomes issues that plagued earlier versions of the male contraceptive. In addition to concerns about how low testosterone would affect sex drive, researchers feared the pill would need to be taken twice daily, given the speed that hormones clear the male body, reports the Guardian. DMAU, however, contains fatty acid undecanoate which is believed to slow the clearance. Some 100 men aged 18 to 50 received a placebo or varying doses (100mg, 200mg, or 400mg) of the pill, which contains an androgen and a progestin and must be taken with food. After 28 days, all pill-popping patients saw low testosterone levels, while patients given the 400mg dose saw a "marked suppression" in testosterone and two other hormones needed for sperm production, reports the Telegraph. Patients also saw mild weight gain and a slight drop in HDL or "good cholesterol" levels, per NBC News. But "very few subjects reported symptoms consistent with testosterone deficiency or excess," and liver and kidney function remained healthy, senior researcher Stephanie Page says in a release. "These promising results are unprecedented in the development of a prototype male pill." Research will now focus on effects over longer periods. (Another male pill might leave hormones alone.)