Nexium Double Whammy

October 21, 2013, 10:30AM. By Jane Mundy

Oklahoma City, OKSteve says that Nexium caused a “double whammy”: he suffered a broken rib and was hospitalized for low magnesium levels. “The manufacturer should have been advertising Nexium side effects, especially Nexium fracture risk, instead of promoting it for acid reflux,” Steve says.

“I had been taking Nexium for about four years for the treatment of acid reflux and it worked. Then the night of Sunday, August 8, I was lying in bed watching a pro football game. I wasn’t doing anything - I didn’t even cough, move or turn - and my rib just cracked, I heard it pop. I couldn’t believe it!”

There isn’t much you can do for a cracked rib. Steve saw his doctor and was prescribed pain pills. “For about a month it hurt when I breathed,” he says. “My doctor was just as flummoxed as me. I started to feel better, but in October, I wound up in ER with chest pains; it was a pain to the right of my heart. I had a bunch of tests, from EKG to ABC but nothing looked untoward. At first these doctors thought I was feeding them a line or maybe I just had indigestion. But my heart doctor figured out it was low magnesium, one of the side effects of Nexium. And it causes localized muscle pain.”

Because Steve already had two heart attacks, he thought this was the third, and maybe final. He was admitted to the hospital with an IV drip containing magnesium. Nobody linked his symptoms with Nexium.

“The week after I got out of hospital I put two and two together,” Steve adds. “I saw a Nexium commercial on TV and noticed the narrative had changed. Now they listed their side effects and that is when I decided not to take it anymore. I went back to my doctor and told him to give me something else. He didn’t argue, he more or less agreed with me. I’m sure he doesn’t want to say anything damning about a drug he prescribed.

“They should have been advertising those side effects before this. I don’t remember any mention about low magnesium levels or heart problems. I have a different med for acid reflux that is under control so I didn’t even need to take Nexium in the first place.”

Steve has also filed a claim against AstraZeneca, the Nexium manufacturer. Like other plaintiffs who have filed Nexium bone injury lawsuits, Steve was unaware of the Nexium risks and believes his cracked rib was caused by Nexium. Plaintiffs claim the acid reflux drug can cause osteoporosis, loss of bone density and/or Nexium bone fractures. Naturally, Steve is concerned that he might suffer another fracture.

Steve should be more concerned about his heart. A study published in the current issue of Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association (July 3, 2013), shows that stomach acid-suppressing proton pump inhibitors (PPIs), including brand name Nexium, may raise the risk of heart disease and heart attack.

In the study, John P. Cooke, clinical professor and chair of the department of cardiovascular sciences at Houston Methodist Hospital, found that PPIs reduced the ability of mouse blood vessels to relax by an average of more than 30 percent, and he also found the same effect in human blood vessels. “This is very important because blood vessels need to be able to contract and open up to control blood flow,” said Cooke, according to Forbes Magazine (July 2013). “There’s going to be more information coming out that will, in my opinion, raise concerns about the long-term effects of proton pump inhibitors and risk of heart damage,” Cooke added.