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Why the blue pill is not to blame for sudden deaths during sex

Saturday, December 20, 2025

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The public conclusion is that the blue pill is causing havoc all over the place leading to these deaths.

Photo credit: Nation Media Group

By Joachim Osur

Columnist

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What you need to know:

Research studies are very consistent on the characteristics of the people who have lost their lives in the act.
The sex happens away from the usual place where the victim is used to having sex, such as in a hotel room.

Men coming to the Sexology Clinic have become extra inquisitive about the prescriptions they are getting for the treatment of erectile dysfunction.

“Please do not give me the blue pill, it is very dangerous,” they keep saying.

A few days ago, a man came to the clinic with the wife. I had seen him some days earlier and prescribed treatment. His wife took the medicine from him, stopping him from using them.

“I would rather have a living husband who cannot maintain erections than a dead one,” she said. “I do not want to be a widow, and my children need a father to grow up well.”

These concerns have become pronounced after the social media went awash with news that a journalist had died in a hotel room while having sex with a workmate.

Read: Why some successful men lose their wives to the gardener

Earlier this year, there was a death reported of a Kitengela man in the house of his concubine. The public conclusion is that the blue pill is causing havoc all over the place leading to these deaths.

But trends in sudden death during sex have remained the same over the centuries and continue to happen as they did before the advent of the blue pill. As early as 964 AD, a controversial death of a pope was rumoured to have happened during sex. Then there is Palmerston, a Prime Minister in UK in 1865; Felix Faure, the President of France in 1895; Nelson Rockefeller, the Vice President of USA in 1979; and the count goes on and on.

Research studies are very consistent on the characteristics of the people who have lost their lives in the act. For one, they are mostly men with the male ratio at over 80 per cent. Most of these men are in their middle ages, anything between 40 and 60 years. The acts are heterosexual in nature.

Further, the sexual acts tend to be with a non-regular sex partner, many times an extra-marital affair and occasionally with a prostitute. The sex happens away from the usual place where the victim is used to having sex, such as in a hotel room, a brothel, in a car or even in the office. Reportedly, the sexual acts are extra ordinary, exhibiting unusual styles and with high energy.

The uniqueness of these last strokes that break the camel’s back is that the sexual stimulation is at its maximum. The body is fully engaged with the blood circulatory system under strain to supply oxygenated blood to all muscles and body organs. The heart is at its maximum strain to pump blood and there in lies the common cause of death: Heart attack.

Sudden deaths during sex

The mechanisms leading to cardiac arrest differ with age in these cases. At younger ages, the electrical system of the heart gets disordered and the heart fails to pump in a coordinated manner, a condition called cardiac arrythmia.

In older men, the arteries supplying the blood to the heart get blocked due to age-related changes and this causes the overworked heart to be starved of oxygen, causing its cells to die and the heart to stop.

In all these heart attack cases, the heart is compromised ab initio. Many times, the victim is unaware of their weak heart. The overambitious sex then becomes a trigger of heart failure.

Other than the heart, sudden deaths during sex have been found to result from rapture of blood vessels in the brain. In these cases, the victim has a preexisting weak blood vessel which is bulging and waiting for the right moment to rapture.

Sex offers a conducive environment for the rapture as blood rushes through the arteries to meet the increased demands for oxygen. The weak vessels give way and the bleeding occurs, flooding the brain and leading to death.

Read: Rough love: Why some couples seek pain during intimacy

In a few cases, death has been as a result of asthmatic attack. Oxygen comes through the lungs and a severe attack of asthma suddenly leads to hypoxia at a time when the body needs oxygen the most.

Sex related traumatic injuries occasionally lead to sudden death as well. People fail to recognise danger at the peak of the moment. An example is a case of people having sex in the balcony of a storey building and someone slipping and falling off.

There have also been cases of accidental strangling or suffocation, innocently happening at the peak of leisure with the unintending killer thinking that the victim is coming, only to realise later that they were actually going!

It is in this mix of things that the blue pill was invented a few years ago. It is not unusual to find that the blue pill was used in the acts that led to death. The question, however, is whether death would still have happened irrespective.

From history, it appears that those deaths were bound to happen. Even though the blue pill may have added the excitement, the underlying cause of death was always there in the waiting. The best preventive measure is a full annual medical check that includes checking the heart.

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