Actual users of Lyrica report memory loss, mental confusion, extreme weight gain, hair loss, impaired driving, disorientation, twitching and a lot of I'd-rather-have-my-fibro-symptoms-back-if-this-is-the-cure on askapatient.com. P.S. There are two deaths.
Of course its no secret that Pfizer's blockbusters Viagra, Zoloft and Lipitor are history and its pipeline is bare. In January, it announced it was losing 800 of its researchers and buying Wyeth (no danger of getting new researchers there.)
Nor can its gravy train of antibiotics in food animals--pun intended--last much longer with residues found in meat, water and even crops and world recognition of antibiotic resistance.
Just as people were forgetting that Pfizer paid $430 million in 2004 for criminally promoting Neurontin for bipolar disorder, attention-deficit disorder, restless legs syndrome and other unapproved disorders, an article in the January 9 New England Journal of Medicine titled "The Neurontin Legacy--Marketing through Misinformation and Manipulation," shows it's déjà vu all over again at Pfizer.
Nor is Lyrica the only game in town anymore for fibromyalgia since the FDA approved Lilly's antidepressant Cymbalta in 2008 and Forest Laboratories' antidepressant Savella in January. Now Americans can choose between an antidepressant with a black box warning for suicide and a seizure medication for a disease they didn't know they had--or was an epidemic--ten years ago.
Lyrica itself was slated for an FDA black box suicide warning in 2008. A 92-page appeal from Pfizer last summer called the suicide stats "an exaggeration of risk that is introduced by ascertainment bias" and cautioned against "overwarning…patients and prescribers" so that they "underestimate the risks of declining treatment." Especially risks for Pfizer.
As Northwestern students negotiate the snow and construction at the future home of the Richard and Barbara Silverman Hall for Molecular Therapeutics & Diagnostics, any pain they feel is from all-nighters, all-you-can-drink nights and the cold--not fibromyalgia. Few will remember Lyrica when classes start in the new science hall. Nor can a building be withdrawn.
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