Drug giant Pfizer has recently been hit with a flurry of lawsuits from women claiming that the company's blockbuster cholesterol drug Lipitor caused them to develop type 2 diabetes.
Pfizer released Lipitor in 2007, promoting it as a safe way to lower levels of LDL cholesterol, commonly called "bad cholesterol" and linked to an elevated risk of heart disease.
In 2011, however, a study showed an increased risk of type 2 diabetes among Lipitor patients. Critics of the study suggested that the results were due to the fact that patients on cholesterol-lowering drugs are already at higher risk for diabetes than the general population, because they tend to have higher blood pressure and blood sugar levels. Nevertheless, in 2012, the FDA instructed Pfizer to add a warning label to Lipitor showing that the drug might increase the risk of type 2 diabetes.
Then, in May of this year, a study in the British Medical Journal showed that Lipitor increases the risk of type 2 diabetes even more than other drugs in the same class (the statins), showing that the link cannot be due to preexisting risk alone. Women are particularly susceptible to this side effect: female Lipitor patients have a 22 percent higher risk of developing a new case of type 2 diabetes than women taking other statins.
More on this story here.
Eddie
No comments:
Post a Comment