Word: tpa
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...heart drug hit the market in 1987 in a blinding flash of pitchmen, promotion and public relations hoo-ha. The product of biotech breakthroughs, TPA was touted as clearly superior to the competition, a clot-busting drug called streptokinase, on the market for 15 years. Though TPA (for tissue plasminogen activator) is 10 times as expensive as the older drug, the majority of U.S. doctors bought the pitch, and the new drug became the favored method of breaking up clots in heart-attack victims. Then last week an international team of researchers reported what some doctors had suspected all along...
...saga of TPA is a glaring example of what some experts believe is a pervasive problem in American health care: how high-pressure marketing tactics by drug companies combine with the lure of a glamorous high-tech product to persuade doctors to adopt the latest medication, even when it offers no clear advantage. "Doctors are enamored of new technologies," says Dr. Stephen Schondelmeyer, director of the Pharmaceutical Economics Research Institute at Purdue University. "We have this attraction to 'new is better,' even though that is not always true...
...with TPA, the price difference was extreme -- about $2,500 a treatment vs. $220 for a dose of streptokinase -- while the advantages were murky. Several studies showed that the new drug worked more quickly to open up blocked arteries, but whether that really made a difference in patient survival was unclear...
...hospital study, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and known as TIMI II (for thrombolysis in myocardial infarction phase II trial), involved 3,262 patients who had suffered apparent heart attacks. Within four hours of their attacks, all patients received a powerful clot dissolver, known as TPA (tissue plasminogen activator), along with heparin and aspirin to inhibit blood coagulation. Of the 1,636 patients in the invasive-strategy group, 928 underwent angiography and angioplasty within 18 to 48 hours after their attacks...
Another clot-dissolving drug, Urokinase, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration for experimental use in pulmonary embolism victims in 1977, but TPA seems to work more effectively, Goldhaber said...