While companies pushing drugs like Viagra and Cialis keep stalking their middle-aged male audiences with commercial after commercial on NFL Sunday—hawking little blue pills meant to evoke suggestive smiles and the dimming of lights—Dr. Craig Niederberger, professor of urology and engineering at the University of Illinois-Chicago, aims to investigate and reverse links between erectile dysfunction and his own target audience: male bicyclists.
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Once an avid cyclist himself, Niederberger, 51, is leading a study of the effects of bike seats on male pelvic blood flow that, down the line, will result in the engineering of what he hopes to be the least detrimental bike seat possible. In the study, now in its fifth year, researchers map the arteries of subjects in an ultrasound lab, measuring the force required to block blood supply to the genitals. (In case you didn’t know, restricted blood supply, often caused by blood vessel or nerve damage, can lead to erectile dysfunction.) This “occlusion force” is then compared with the force each bike seat exerts during a series of rides.
“Our studies are the only ones that I know of that measure force in typical bicycle riding as well as in the lab,” Niederberger says. “We were able to take guys out on their own bikes with a variety of different seats.”
As a regular cyclist, one who doesn’t own a car and rides year-round, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wonder about damage “down there.” I even switched my seat a couple years back, updating a clunky mid-80s vintage seat to a sleeker one that I thought was more practical.
