Avandia: Diabetes Drug Causes Heart Attacks

It is front page news that the pharmaceutical company, GlaxoSmithKline used unethical and hard fisted tactics to get their drug into the marketplace.

I have been writing on this subject for weeks. This is another example of a drug that was pushed on sick patients giving them even deadlier problems.

Avandia is prescribed to treat Type 2 diabetes patients. It also goes by the name of Rosiglitazone. This drug had been linked to 304 deaths during the last quarter of 2009. It is also linked to low blood sugar, liver problems, fractures, weight gain, and macular edema (a vision loss problem). Many doctors are pressing the FDA to recall the drug but the FDA is not rushing to do that. Right now, all they are willing to do is issue a black box warning label. There are already drugs on the market for Type 2 diabetes that are safer and less deadly. This drug is not needed when the side effects are so life threatening.

Facts About Clinical Trials You Need To Know:

The first fact is clinical trials are conducted for short periods of time usually for 8 weeks to 6 months.

These clinical trials are performed on a small number of people under controlled conditions.

When these clinical trials end, the FDA reviews those trials and clears the drug to be released into the market place. This approval comes before long term affects can be evaluated. Deadly heart damage and liver toxicity take months or years to show up. A new drug has no long term clinical studies to show its long term safety.

Drug Companies Have Great PR Experts: They spend billions of dollars to push their drugs on consumers and physicians.

Drugs in the US are given fantastic PR on television. They start the ad showing an older person in pain looking very miserable. You immediately identify with the person in pain. They next show the person with a smile after taking the drug. The ad then very quickly reads the side effects. The ad ends with positive statements of how the drug helped that person. Because the positive statements are restated, you forget the side effects it mentioned. Your last visual impression is how the individual can now play golf again or play with their children. It certainly does not show that person dropping dead from the heart problems the drug caused several years later.

The most dangerous products have the best PR. They have to in order to sell a bad product. Remember the Marlborough Man advertising cigarettes? He was handsome, sexy and made smoking look appealing. Years later the ads showing a person dying of lung cancer or the black lung was much more realistic of the facts. Those TV ads influenced thousands of impressionable young people to start smoking. Women were supposed to look sexier smoking as well. Remember the old movies with a cigarette dangling from the mouth a beautiful movie starlet. I wonder how beautiful she looked years later as the smoking ruined the collagen in her skin. Imagine how healthy she felt while coughing up thick, yellow mucus from her lungs. I am sure she enjoyed how her clothes and hair stank from the smoke. Advertising agencies have done a great job throughout history to push dangerous products. By the time the deadly side effects show up, these companies have made billions of dollars. This is at the expense of you, the consumer.

New drugs turn you into a guinea pig to pad their financial pockets. The FDA is at fault for clearing these drugs with NO long term data on side effects. With the growing number of drugs that have been recalled for deadly side effects, you would think that the FDA would change its policy. This is not happening and the FDA is still pushing out drugs into the market place that later prove to be dangerous.

Avandia Researchers Knew Avandia Caused Heart Problems:

Avandia came out on the market in 1999 and had made the company 3 billion dollars by 2006. In 2007, research was proving that taking Avandia gave diabetes patients a 43% greater risk for heart problems, heart attacks, and liver toxicity problems.

Unethical Practices and Downright Fraud Is the Way Many Pharmaceutical Companies play the game. The game is money and greed.

Investigation proved that the company knew the drug caused heart problems early on. They used fraud and intimidation according to this investigation to pressure independent physicians into minimizing Avantia's side effects. This drug company in some cases pressured the chief of staff at these facilities to influence resistant doctors into both prescribing the drug and downplaying the side effects.

GlaxoSmithKline spent thousands of dollars for PR strategies to downplay and misrepresent the heart damage their drug was causing. Out and out lies and misrepresentation at the expense of thousands of diabetic patients who trusted their doctors advice to take the drug.

This story will be in the news for weeks and of course the company is refuting that the drug is dangerous and that they used unethical tactics. I would remind you that Avandia's stock is taking a nose dive this week. This investigation will result in law suits for the heart and liver problems that have occurred with Avandia. Just like the cigarette industry, drug companies will fight to the end to protect their corporate profits. These profits are being made on you. It took years for the cigarette industry to admit the overwhelming evidence that smoking is deadly. They fought it with biased research and fraud. I can assure you that the evidence that this drug is dangerous will later be proven without a doubt. This will lead to its eventual recall by the FDA. There are safer solutions for diabetes.

References:

San Diego Union Tribune, San Diego, CA, Feb 20th, 2010

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aU3YmppNKRGw

http://www.statesman.com/news/nation/fda-reports-pull-avandia-off-market-258131.html?cxtype=rss_nation