Truemors
is reporting from
Member
NP Rank:
NP Rank:
Avandia Report Released: Recommend Actos Medication Instead
Share:
by Amy Judd | February 20, 2010 at 09:37 am
1317 views | 1 Recommendation | 1 comment
The Avandia report was released yesterday and its findings may shock some people. Avandia is a controversial diabetes drug for Type 2 diabetes, and confidential government reports obtained by the New York Times state that hundreds of people suffer from heart attacks and heart failure every month due to taking Avandia. In 2009, 304 deaths were linked to Avandia.
These reports want Avandia removed from the market and want those patients to be given the medication Actos instead.
In the New York Times, they state that if patients were given this drug and not Avandia it would prevent about 500 heart attacks and 300 cases of heart failure each month.
The authors of the report are employees of the Food and Drug Administration:
“Rosiglitazone should be removed from the market,” one report, by Dr. David Graham and Dr. Kate Gelperin of the Food and Drug Administration, concludes. Both authors recommended that Avandia be withdrawn.
Avandia is manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline, and while some officials want the drug to be taken off the market completely as Actos is considered a safer alternative, others say that Avandia should be an option for doctors who can then decide themselves what to prescribe their patients.
GlaxoSmithKline said that it had studied Avandia extensively and that “scientific evidence simply does not establish that Avandia increases” the risk of heart attacks.
This disagreement is not a new one, it has been going on for years, but a new clinical trial of the drug led the U.S Senate to make a statement that GlaxoSmithKline should have warned about the potential risks of the drugs.
Hundreds of thousands of people still take Avandia and it was once one of the biggest-selling drugs in the world.
Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the F.D.A's drug center says that she wants another advisory committee to discuss the future of the drug:
“I await the recommendations of the advisory committee,” the agency’s commissioner, Dr. Margaret Hamburg, said Friday night. “Meanwhile, I am reviewing the inquiry made by Senators Baucus and Grassley and I am reaching out to ensure that I have a complete understanding and awareness of all of the data and issues involved.”
Senator Max Baucus had this to say of the report:
Patients trust drug companies with their health and their lives, and GlaxoSmithKline abused that trust.”
GlaxoSmithKline disagreed with the findings of the report.
Advertisement
NowPublic on Facebook
What is NowPublic?
NowPublic lets people work together to cover news events around the world.
Crowd Power
Related Stories
Recommendations (1)
Anonymous user
Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (1)
at 03:58 on March 10th, 2010
This note to publicly commend my Doctor for not being a Drug Company pill pusher, and who took me off Avandia about 2 years ago immediately it became clear that use of it could be dangerous to my health. I don't expect the drug companies to stand up and be honest and do the right thing - that would be too much to hope for.....