Premature ejaculation? Spray this on.

An anesthetic spray applied to the penis five minutes before intercourse enables men who suffer from premature ejaculation to last six times longer after penetration, a study shows.

Premature ejaculation -- defined by the International Society for Sexual Medicine as orgasm that occurs within about one minute of penetration in the majority of encounters -- can be a "very distressing" condition for men, one that can cause frustration and make them avoid sexual intimacy, Dr. W. Wallace Dinsmore from the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast, UK, noted in a prepared statement.

It's estimated that "as many as 40 percent of men will experience premature ejaculation at some time in their lives," Dinsmore said.

Topical anesthetic creams have long been used in the treatment of premature ejaculation, but tend to be messy and inconvenient. The PSD502 spray, made by London, UK-based Plethora Solutions Ltd, is a combination of two anesthetics, lidocaine and prilocaine, which act, researchers believe, as desensitizing agents, which can help delay orgasm for men.

"Our study shows that when the PSD502 spray was applied to the man's penis five minutes before intercourse it improved both sexual performance and sexual satisfaction, which are key factors in treating premature ejaculation" Dinsmore noted.

In the study, Dinsmore, a Plethora Solutions consultant and investigator, and Dr. Michael G. Wyllie, a director and shareholder of the company, randomly assigned 300 young adult men (average age 35) with lifelong premature ejaculation to use the PSD502 spray or an inactive placebo spray for 3 months. Every time a couple had intercourse during the study, they used a stopwatch to measure the time from penetration to orgasm.

According to a report in the medical journal, the British Journal of Urology (BJU) International, the time from penetration to orgasm increased from an average of 0.6 minutes to 3.8 minutes in the PSD502 spray group and to just 1.1 minutes in the placebo group.

Men in the study were able to last an average of 6.3 times longer after penetration when they used the spray. The placebo group lasted 1.7 times longer.

After 3 months in the study, 90 percent of the men in the treatment group were able to delay orgasm for more than 1 minute following penetration, compared with 54 percent in the placebo group; 74 percent of men in the treatment group managed to last more than 2 minutes before orgasm, compared with 22 percent in the placebo group.

Sixty-two percent of men in the treatment group said their orgasms were 'good' or 'very good' after 3 months, compared with 20 percent before the study started. The figures for the placebo group were slightly lower at the end of the study (19 percent) than at the start of the study (21 percent).

There were no serious side effects reported during the study.