Word: redux
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...role in mood and emotion has been paralleled--and in some cases driven--by a boom in drugs that target serotonin more or less specifically. Among them are such popular antidepressants as Elavil, Prozac, Zoloft and the hot new herbal medication St. John's wort; powerful appetite suppressants including Redux and fenfluramine; and antipsychotics such as clozapine. Like every other drug, the ones that zero in on serotonin have side effects. Elavil makes people sleepy. Zoloft can trigger headache and nausea. Zoloft and Prozac may cause sexual dysfunction. All these symptoms are annoying, to be sure, yet they...
...reason for all the retrenchment: potentially lethal side effects. Over the summer, the FDA revealed that 82 patients had developed defects in their heart valves while on fen-phen, and that seven patients had come down with the same condition on Redux (which is a chemical cousin of fenfluramine, the "fen" in fen-phen...
...that weren't bad enough, physicians reported that a woman who had been taking fen-phen for less than a month died of primary pulmonary hypertension, a sometimes fatal lung condition already associated with Redux. And an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association last month confirmed earlier reports that both fen-phen and Redux can cause brain damage in lab animals...
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...
...that really does, however, is bring the numbers down to where they should have been all along. Manufacturers said from the start that their pills offered a short-term therapy for the obese, not for people looking to fit 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...