Ezetrol, Canada Legal News Articles & Interviews

Toronto, ON As if the Zetia and Vytorinissue wasn't enough of a frustration on its own, north of the border in Canada the Canadian equivalent of Zetia—Ezetrol—is proving just as mystifying. At issue: does the cholesterol drug work? Is it harmful? And did the manufacturer, as it was accused of doing in the US, withhold important safety and efficacy information in an effort to protect sales?

Ottawa, ON Nowadays, Canada's neighbors include the likes of pharmaceutical giants Merck/Schering Plough; they also include the US federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Merck/Schering and its Canadian subsidiary Merck Frosst is the big pharma consortium that manufactures and sells Ezetrol (Zetia in the US market), the anti-cholesterol drug that is now under close scrutiny after ENHANCE test results released in January indicated that it is no better (and quite possibly worse) than cheaper generic statin drugs at reducing arterial plaque and thus users' risk of heart attack and stroke. The FDA is the federal agency that approved Zetia/Ezetrol in October 2002.

Toronto, ON Canadian visitors to LawyersAndSettlements may wonder about all the recent uproar around Zetia, Merck Pharmaceuticals' costly and quite possibly ineffective anti-cholesterol drug, and its offshoot Vytorin, the combination Zetia/simvastatin (Zocor) drug produced jointly by Merck/Schering-Plough. Vytorin, of course, was the subject of the recently released ENHANCE test results. Those results indicated that while Zetia in combination with simvastatin (i.e., Vytorin) did enhance lowering of LDL (bad) cholesterol, the combination drug did no better than simvastatin alone in reducing users' artery plaque, and therefore their risk of heart attack and stroke.