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Just a few hours ago, a U.S. federal panel unanimously rejected a drug to treat a condition called female sexual desire disorder.

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Critics claimed drug companies simply created the condition to market a potentially profitable drug,

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but as senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen reports, for some, the problem is very real.

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A happy marriage, except for one thing.

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So, you've been married for 20 years. And how often do you have intercourse?

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Probably about once every three months I would say, yeah.

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It's sad. It...you know, sometimes I think it would be better if I had never met my husband

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because he's such a wonderful guy, and he doesn't deserve this.

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Or I wonder if it would have just been better if he had met somebody else.

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Why did CYNDI lose her libido?

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To figure that out, Stanford University researchers put women in MRI machines just like I'm doing here.

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Now here's the really interesting part.

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While these women with low libido were lying there in the MRI machines,

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they were actually watching pornography, and the MRI was registering their brain's reaction.

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I mean this is so graphic it's hard to imagine not having much of a reaction to it. 

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Yeah, but if your brain's working differently and you don't have, you know, enough of a certain neurotransmitter,

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then you're not going to react to it because you don't have the ability to react to it,

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and that's what we found in the research study.

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You can see here this is a difference between women with low libido, in the blue,

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and the yellow is women with normal libido.

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The women who had normal libidos, their brains tended to light up in this orange area.

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And this is an area where positive emotions are registered.

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Exactly.

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When you see these images, does that tell you it's not really their fault?

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In a lot of cases it's not. It absolutely can be a problem in their brain where they have this difference.

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So, when you went to go see doctors about this initially, what were you told?

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Yeah, just, you know, relax, have some wine, you know, watch some porn.

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Did any of that work?

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No, not really.

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Do you ever blame yourself for what's happened to you?

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I spent a lot of time, yeah, blaming myself. Did I do something wrong?

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You know, there's that part of me that keeps hoping something, you know, will happen someday,

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and that we'll know what's going on and how to fix it. It's a very sad part of our lives.

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Well, since the success of Viagra, the drug companies are not giving up to find an equivalent for women.