Return of Bextra, Prescription Drug Cos
June 1, 2005 11:37

Medical News Today, Fri, 20 May 2005 4:18 PM PDTPfizer CEO Discusses Possible Return of Bextra, Prescription Drug Costs http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=24815 The COX-2 inhibitor Bextra, which Pfizer... suspended from the U.S. market in April citing safety concerns, might return to the market, Pfizer CEO and Chair Hank McKinnell said in an interview with USA Today reporter Julie Appleby published Friday.

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Newsweek, Fri, 03 Jun 2005 9:03 AM PDT With Vioxx gone, pain drug prices jump WASHINGTON - Prices for dozens of prescription painkillers have jumped by as much as 15 percent since Merck & Co. Inc. pulled its once-popular arthritis drug Vioxx from the market last year, a report released Thursday found.

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ANAHEIM, California (AP) - With prescription drugs Vioxx and Bextra already pulled from the market, a study has raised disturbing questions about the heart safety of long-term use of over-the-counter pain relievers such as Advil, Motrin and Aleve.

Smokers in Norway who took such drugs for at least six months had twice the risk of dying of a heart attack, stroke or other heart-related problem. The findings came from a study of whether these pain relievers could prevent oral cancer. The drugs did, in fact, cut the risk of developing oral cancer in half, but the deaths that were prevented were offset by the increased risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, according to the study, reported last Monday at an American Association for Cancer Research conference in Anaheim. The study was relatively small - 908 people - and involved people prone to heart problems and cancer because they smoked. But specialists said it supports the Food and Drug Administration?s recent decision to warn about long-term use of all such painkillers except aspirin.

The findings add to the suspicion that the heart risk extends beyond the so-called cox-2 drugs - Bextra,Vioxx and Celebrex - to the larger family of medications known as nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDs, which include naproxen, ibuprofen and virtually all other over-the-counter pain relievers except acetaminophen or Tylenol. In recent months, many doctors have switched patients to these over-the-counter medications, believing them to be safer alternatives. "To the best of our knowledge, these are the first data to support putting a box warning on NSAIDs, not just cox-2s," said Dr. Andrew Dannenberg, a Cornell University scientist who helped do the Norway study.

Vioxx was pulled from the market last fall when a different study, testing whether it could prevent colon cancer, showed a higher heart disease risk. The FDA recently persuaded Pfizer to stop selling Bextra for safety reasons, but Pfizer?s Celebrex was allowed to remain. Some researchers from the new study in Norway have been Pfizer consultants. The fresh information presented on Monday should persuade others to study these over-the-counter drugs in more depth because deaths were not lower, said Dr. Raymond DuBois, a Vanderbilt University cancer expert. A deeper look revealed that the NSAID users were dying at twice the rate of the others from heart-related problems. There were 42 cardiovascular deaths among the 263 painkiller users and 41 deaths among the much larger group of 562 people who had never taken such drugs.

Risk was highest among ibuprofen users, who were nearly three times more likely to die of cardiovascular disease than non-NSAID users. Aspirin was the only NSAID that did not seem to raise the risk, but the numbers of aspirin users in the study were small. Doctors said the NSAID dose made no difference in risk, but others said this should be studied in future experiments. "There are important uncertainties. One of them is the doses and one is what the effect would be in the larger population," said Dr. Michael Thun, chief of epidemiology for the American Cancer Society, who had no role in the study. Thun said he would propose a larger study on over-the-counter NSAIDs using the cancer society?s huge database, which contains information on more than 1.2 million Americans.

San Jose Mercury News, Sun, 05 Jun 2005 5:22 AM PDT Lube job's no cure-all, but it beats surgery Way back in 2004, lots of people with sore knees because of osteoarthritis reached for Vioxx and Bextra and other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. Popping a pill for pain sounded much better than getting an injection, explains Dr. Carl Nissen, associate professor of orthopedics at the University of Connecticut Health Center.