When Viagra first hit the pharmacies, I remember thinking, "There has to be a catch." I had just started working at Men's Health, and my colleagues and I wondered what the potential downsides could be. I'm not sure if I had this particular thought at the time, but at some point I equated Viagra with liposuction: Some of the people who got the operation or used the pill were probably ignoring symptoms of bigger problems.

Someone getting lipo might have problems that could be (and probably should be) addressed with diet and exercise. But what about the guy who needs Viagra to pop wood? Soon enough, doctors began to talk about some of the problems commonly associated with erectile dysfunction, including heart disease and diabetes. If someone can take a pill to change a licorice whip into a meat stick, there's less motivation to deal with the underlying medical issues that kept Chubby from inflating in the first place.

So it's not surprising to see this new report:

Findings from two studies of men with diabetes add to the evidence that erectile dysfunction can be a powerful early warning sign for serious heart disease.

A Hong Kong study of 2,306 men with diabetes but no signs of heart disease found that those with erectile dysfunction at the start were 58 percent more likely to have a heart attack or other major cardiac problem over the next four years than those with adequate sexual function.

And Italian physicians who followed 291 men who had diabetes and early coronary heart disease for four years reported similar numbers -- those with erectile dysfunction were twice as likely as men without the problem to have major adverse events, including strokes.

Here's why this information matters:

"These reports add two things to what we already know," said Dr. R. Parker Ward, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, who led an earlier study linking erectile dysfunction with heart disease. "One is that they indicate the importance of erectile dysfunction in diabetic patients in terms of predicting future cardiovascular events. These studies suggest that the additional presence of erectile dysfunction places them at incrementally higher risk. Secondly, they show that even when considered in combination with traditional risk factors, erectile dysfunction offers incremental information about the risk of future cardiovascular events."

As it happens, this seemingly unrelated story appeared right below the one I just highlighted on the Google News search engine this morning:

A Catholic priest has filed a restraining order against the parents of a severely autistic 13-year-old boy in an effort to keep him from attending the church in Bertha on Sundays.

The Rev. Daniel Walz alleges that Adam Race's unruly behavior endangers others who attend the Church of St. Joseph.

There's no real connection here, except it made me think back to my own Catholic upbringing. Typically, families in our parishes had more kids than you could count on one hand. In other words, not a lot of erectile dysfunction going on there. I think the credit goes to the tradition of telling young Catholics early and often about the evils of sex. The more you condemn it, the more enticing it becomes, and soon you have entire generations of male Catholics thinking about sex all day and ejaculating as many times as humanly possible at night.

Of course I'm mostly just joking here -- I assume Catholic men have as much ED as anyone else. (And I'd hate to be the one who had to decide whether or not an autistic teen can attend Mass, no matter how disruptive he is.) But on the bright side, those frequent ejaculations do seem to have long-term benefit to the furtive wankers who induce them.

So there's that.

Tuesday blog meat:

* Most people talk about losing one's marbles as if it's a bad thing. Not necessarily.

* Presidential health: It's too important to leave to the president's personal physician.