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News Articles >> Avandia and heart failure: Did Avandia ..
Avandia and heart failure: Did Avandia pave the way to this woman's heart attack?
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| August 16, 2007. By Brenda Frohloff |  RSS  Del.icio.us  Seed Newsvine  Facebook |
Edmonton, AB: Karen Trelford was stunned to see a report on television this summer that the diabetes drug Avandia exposed its users to a 43% higher risk of heart failure and heart attack.
The Edmonton woman had good reason to react to the news. In the late spring of 2006, Karen's doctor prescribed Avandia for her. She took it for several months before stopping because her insurer would not pay for it. Several months after she stopped taking Avandia, in late 2006, Karen had a heart attack, at the age of 49.
Karen was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at the age of three, and doesn't remember a time when she did not have to have insulin injections every day. Avandia was supposed to relieve her of having to use insulin, but instead it was followed by the heart attack and kidney failure.
The heart attack marked the beginning of a whole host of new and serious health problems. Before her encounter with Avandia, she had not had problems with hypertension or elevated cholesterol. Since the heart attack, she has had to take medications for both conditions.
She was also diagnosed with kidney failure after the heart attack. She was put on dialysis immediately, and continues to go for 4 hours of dialysis three days a week. Karen is unable to work, and because of the kidney failure, she is no longer permitted to drive. And, with thousands of others, she is waiting for a kidney transplant. She is also slated to undergo heart surgery.
What keeps her going these days, says Karen, are "the Internet and my dogs". The dogs are Boxers, a 13-year-old male and a 6-year-old female. She also says that she does most of her shopping at Wal-Mart, because there she can use one of the store's electric shopping carts.
Karen says she felt "used" when she learned about the research into the alleged dangers of heart failure connected with Avandia—she felt that the drug marketers cared more about making money than warning innocent people about the possible risks associated with the drug. What was worse--both the manufacturer and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had allegedly known about the increased risk long before they told the public.
Avandia was the subject of a meta-analysis reported in the New England Journal of Medicine May 21. That overview study by a team led by cardiac specialist Dr. Steven Nissen concluded that patients taking Avandia had a 43% greater risk of heart attack and death compared with those patients not taking Avandia as part of their diabetes treatment.
Following the publication of the report, the FDA had Avandia's manufacturer, GlaxoSmithKline, put a Black Box (highest level) warning on the packaging, to alert physicians and patients of the possible heightened heart failure risk.
Was Avandia the villain in Karen's story? We will all find out when she has her day in court.
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