Word: bextra
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...painkilling drugs. The once high-flying anti-inflammatories known as cox-2 inhibitors nearly crashed and burned in September 2004, when Merck's popular Vioxx was pulled from the market after a study revealed it could raise the risk of heart attack and stroke. A competitor made by Pfizer, Bextra, was yanked some months later, leaving only Pfizer's Celebrex behind-and a new, required safety warning hasn't exactly done wonders for that drug's appeal. Celebrex sales are off more than 40% for the first nine months of this year, and Pfizer is also watching as Merck parries...
...inhibitor). Then there's the sad lesson of Vioxx and its ilk. That category of painkillers captured a $5 billion-a-year market on the celebrated promise that they were safer than older, cheaper analgesics like Tylenol or Advil. In this case, as the nation learned when Vioxx and Bextra were withdrawn and Celebrex got slapped with a black-box warning, we were paying a premium to trade a sizable risk of tummy trouble for a smaller but still troubling risk of heart attacks and strokes...
That left two drugs in the same family, Pfizer's Celebrex and Bextra, on pharmacy shelves, along with lingering questions about whether they too could cause heart attacks and strokes...
Those concerns were answered last week by a series of studies that showed an increased risk of heart problems in users of not just Vioxx but Celebrex and Bextra as well, and by FDA advisory panels that recommended stronger warnings for the whole class of pain relievers known as COX-2 inhibitors. "The cardiovascular problems appear to be a class effect," says Dr. Eric Topol, director of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic. "But the magnitude of risk does seem to differ from drug to drug." It's now up to the FDA to decide whether the dangers, which...
...share of rough patches. But "rough patch" hardly begins to describe all the bad news that has battered the agency over the past few months, from the possible suicide risks with antidepressants like Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft to the cardiac risks of pain-killers like Vioxx, Celebrex and Bextra. Americans depend on the FDA to carefully weigh the benefits and risks of all drugs before approving them, but the agency has had trouble lately shaking the growing perception, justified or not, that it has been working harder protecting the pharmaceutical industry than the public it's supposed to serve...