If you own a television, and watch it even intermittently no doubt you’ve seen the charming ads for Crestor, a cholesterol lowering medication produced by AstraZeneca, a multi-national pharmaceutical company based in the UK.
The ads employ the voice of Patrick Stewart (Capt. Jean-Luc Picard to Star Trek fans) reciting amusing rhymes after the fashion of Dr. Seuss about the benefits of Crestor as the cholesterol lowering medicine of choice. Essentially the ads claim Crestor is the most effective cholesterol reducer on the market (a claim the FDA has called into doubt by the way).
What the ads don’t tell you (naturally enough) is that the risk of death from using Crestor is twice that of other cholesterol reducing drugs on the market.
More after the break . . .
Dr. Richard Karas of the Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston, who led the study, said his team found a rate of 28 adverse events per million prescriptions of Crestor.
That was about 2.2 times more than the adverse events seen with Merck and Co’s Zocor and 6.8 times higher than for Pfizer Inc’s Lipitor.
There were six deaths per million prescriptions on Crestor as compared to three per million for Zocor, one per million with Bristol Myers Squibb’s Pravachol and two per million for Lipitor.
And this wan’t the first time that Crestor has come under fire regarding safety concerns. Back in December, 2004, concern about the drug’s safety were enough for one Democratic Congressman, Henry Waxman to request that the FDA take action:
Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Government Reform, said in a letter to the FDA on Friday that AstraZeneca’s advertising conflicts with the FDA’s public statements about the drug. He asked the FDA to review the company’s statements and order them to post a correction if the statements are incorrect.
“Either AstraZeneca is misleading the public about Crestor’s safety, or FDA officials are giving the company private assurances that conflict with the agency’s public position,” Waxman wrote. He said the company’s statement on its Web site that it had been assured that senior-level FDA officials have “no concern in relation to Crestor’s safety” appears to conflict with FDA statements.
. . . Waxman pointed to one newspaper interview in which Steven Galson, acting director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said the agency “had been very concerned about Crestor since the day it was approved, and we’ve been watching it very carefully.”
Nonetheless, the FDA has not chosen to take any action regarding Crestor. Indeed, it lends AstraZeneca and Crestor the full weight of it’s support despite an ever-increasing evidence of problems with the drug:
. . . FDA spokeswoman Laura Alvey said that the new analysis yielded no new information. “We haven’t found any convincing evidence that Crestor poses any more of a risk than the other statins,” she said.
So for all you AstraZeneca shareholders out there, blow a big wet smoochy toward the FDA today. A better regulatory friend would be hard to find.
As for Crestor consumers . . .
How long do you think — how many years — should a drug be on the market before it’s safe to take it?
I’ve been taking Diclofenac for arthritis pain. I got a prescription for Celebrex but never filled it because it was too expensive.
Last week, when I picked up my refill, the pharmacist told me that he’d just read that Diclofenac is now the top-selling drug in the world.
It’s a drug that’s seen the test of time. My doctor and pharmacist both tell me it’s very safe to take. From what I’ve read of anecdotal accounts, Celebrex and Vioxx are better at relieving pain. But at what price.
They’re not better at relieving pain. They were supposed to have fewer side effects, particularly gastrointestinal side effects. But in terms of pain relief? No difference (except maybe a placebo effect in some people).
Ha! There’s something about paying $100 for a month’s supply — versus about $10-15 for Diclofenac — that makes one think one’s getting a better drug.
In 2001, Bayer withdrew its statin class cholesterol medication (Baycol) voluntarily from the market after reports of elevated death rates.
And Crestor is one of five. I guess people are willing to assume this risk as the price of indulgence. As one article put it:
What ever did we do before the advent of big advertising to push drugs? How we are manipulated! I had an adverse reaction to Lipitor and now take nothing. I am a vegetarian, eat no meat, poultry or fish, and eat a LOT of good things. My cholesterol is still high… will I go on another statin? No… not unless it’s life threatening. They can push their drugs on national tv until the cows come home, I’m not buying it.
Now why do you suppose that Viagra and other libido drugs are given to sex offenders compliments of Medicaid? It couldn’t have something to do with big pharma, now could it? We are so mired in corporatism and consumerism that human decency and morals don’t even enter into the picture anymore.
I agree with you Nag, we were told back in 1994 that congress, the republican congress would change welfare as we knew it. They did, over the last 10 yrs, they have generated more than 2.5 trillion dollars in corporate welfare programs and payments. Microsoft gets a very generous 1.5 billion tax credit in late 90’s, IBM receives 1.6 billion in international advertising tax credits over the last 8 yrs. Haliburton, gets to rape the national treasury at will now with Big Dick “I had other priorities” Cheney, puppeteering Bushco. There are more and more examples of the Corporate take over of our government. The military/industrial complex now takes more than half of all Pentagon expenditures. That is why I have a nice flyer in my car window, Corporate Welfare Dream Team, “pictures of” Bushco, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Delay, Hastert, Frist, Brownback, Gingrich and Allen. These corporate lackeys have written more legislation to line the pockets of American and multi national corporations than all the previous congress’ and presidents combined and that includes LBJ and vietnam. They disgust me, their putrid greed and avarice to the detriment of all human beings not just Americans. I have great faith that justice will be done and those that have harmed such large numbers of other human beings will one day be asked to atone for their greed and avarice. I only hope I get the honor of watching that payment extracted.