Word: phen
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...enough to give a pharmaceutical company CEO heart trouble. A Texas woman who claimed she suffered heart-valve damage from using the diet-drug combination fen-phen was awarded $23 million by a jury Friday in the first verdict involving the controversial drug. It may not be the last. "This could definitely open the floodgates for suits related to this drug," says TIME legal correspondent Adam Cohen. And you don?t even need heart-valve damage to bring a suit -- in Trenton, N.J., this week, jury selection began in a class-action lawsuit involving healthy plaintiffs. They want money...
Americans looking for another quick weight-loss fix may soon be tempted by orlistat, a new diet drug that's nearing approval by the Food and Drug Administration. Hopes previously pinned on Redux and the drug combination Fen-Phen were dashed by revelations that they can cause heart valve damage. But a study published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association says that orlistat has no such life-threatening side effects. Where Redux and Fen-Phen worked in the brain to suppress appetite, orlistat, made by Hoffman-La Roche, blocks the absorption of some fat in the intestines...
...different approach. Instead of using Prozac as a starting point, he turned to fenfluramine, a European weight-loss drug. Because fenfluramine acts on both serotonin and dopamine, it has the unfortunate side effect of putting its users to sleep. That is why doctors came up with fen/phen; the "phen" (phentermine) is an amphetamine-like drug that wakes the patient up again and boosts the metabolism to burn calories faster. Wurtman separated fenfluramine into its two component chemicals, levofenfluramine and dexfenfluramine. The latter has revealed itself to be a powerful weight-loss medication. He patented the drug for M.I.T., founded...
These findings led the New England Journal to publish an editorial admonishing doctors to prescribe the drugs only for patients with severe obesity. Meanwhile, FDA asked drugmakers to put more explicit warnings on fen-phen and Redux labels. Since mid-July, prescriptions for fen-phen have dropped 56%, and those for Redux 36%, according to IMS America, a pharmaceutical-market research firm...
...into a smaller bathing suit. FDA approved Redux with just such a caveat, and when limited to these patients, the drugs may still make sense--despite the risks--because morbid obesity carries its own dangers, including heart disease, diabetes and stroke. Too often, however, Redux and fen-phen were peddled to all comers, almost like candy. The current backlash, says Levine, is a "roller coaster that never should have happened...