What is the relationship between nitric oxide and erections?

Inside your body, you have a short-lived gas that tremendously affects your body's function. This gas—called nitric oxide—has a half-life of less than several seconds. Like a wind that comes in and blows away pollution, nitric oxide is fleeting and exhilarating. You have nitric oxide, then you don't.

So what? We've all got gas from time to time. But we're not talking about gas that clears dinner parties; we're talking about the kind that's important enough to have generated a Nobel Prize in Medicine, important enough to influence whether you have a heart attack, and important enough that it powers a man's anatomical cranes. In fact, this gas—nitric oxide (NO)—was discovered to be the neurotransmitter in the nerve cells that control erections (this finding led to the development of Viagra and its friends). And that makes the declining functioning of nitric oxide over time a key cause of erectile dysfunction and other age-related and artery-related problems.