Drug Alert - Trasylol Blamed For Lethal Injuries During Surgery

Experts are sounding the alarm that patients who received the drug Trasylol (generic aprotinin), during a surgical procedure may have suffered kidney failure, a heart attack, heart failure, or a stroke as an adverse event caused by the drug.

The study found that the use of Trasylol increased the risk of stroke by 181%, myocardial infarction by 48%, and heart failure by 109%, when compared to people who received the 2 alternate drugs.

Surgeons and anesthesiologists had suspected problems with the drug for years, but the number of side effects was lost among the huge number of patients given the drug. "We didn't have good, hard data to prove it," said Dr. O. Wayne Isom, chairman of the department of cardiac and thoracic surgery at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Weil Cornell Medical College, to the Baltimore Sun on January 26, 2006.

Mangano said, the findings raise even more concerns than Vioxx because:

1. aprotinin has been on the market for three times as long as Vioxx, yet few comprehensive safety studies have been conducted since approval;
   
2. the life-threatening complications with aprotinin occurred far more frequently than those with Vioxx; and
   
3. far less expensive generic alternatives to aprotinin which are equally effective in limiting bleeding have been available, but have been underused, Consumer wrote.

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