Word: vytorin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Plain old niacin--a B vitamin--may be better at unclogging arteries than an ingredient in Merck's multibillion-dollar cholesterol drugs Zetia and Vytorin, according to a recent study. It's the third trial in two years to question the pills' effectiveness. Patients are growing skittish: sales of both drugs fell to $4.56 billion in 2008, down 12% from the year before...
Merck/Schering-Plough's one-minute ad for the cholesterol-lowering drug Vytorin is a standard example: it repeats the drug's benefits over and over, but squeezes in risk information only once and just after the halfway mark. You won't see it on TV anymore - the drug maker pulled the ad in January after releasing results of a two-year trial that showed Vytorin was no better than a cheaper generic statin drug at preventing heart disease - but you can watch our dissection of it below...
...billion Combined 2007 sales of the cholesterol-lowering drugs Zetia and Vytorin, manufactured by Schering-Plough and Merck...
...could such a drug be approved in the first place? The Food and Drug Administration would only say that it is "evaluating the available data related to the ENHANCE study." That would include the "food and family" advertisements for Vytorin, which claim that the drugs attack high cholesterol levels, whether they come from your diet or from your genes, or some combination of both. Davies says the company has made "no determination at this time" on the fate of that campaign. But it should give the FDA good reason to evaluate how it approves future medications in this class...
...meantime, doctors are likely to dial back on their use of Vytorin. "If they aren't getting to the target goal [cholesterol level] with generic simvastatin, then because this study is raising questions I think a lot of physicians will think about switching to higher doses of drugs like Lipitor or Crestor before going to Vytorin," says Blumenthal. At least the commercials got one thing right - your risk of heart disease does depend on the food you eat and the genes you inherit. It's just that Vytorin may not be best way to fight those factors when it comes...