
Avandia probe deepens
pharmafile | June 29, 2010 | News story | Sales and Marketing | Avandia, GlaxoSmithKline, diabetes
GlaxoSmithKline has come under further scrutiny from the FDA after two new studies showed patients taking its troubled diabetes medication Avandia had an increased risk of heart failure.
The new studies come after reports detailing surfaced in February that the FDA was questioning GSK’s handling of the data for Avandia’s safety risk.
In light of the new studies, the FDA has scheduled an advisory panel meeting on the heart safety of Avandia on 13-14 July. This panel could see the FDA pull the drug from the market, ask to have the current ‘black box’ warning on the label strengthened even more, or decide to take no action at all.
One of the new two studies was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association by lead author Dr David Graham of the FDA, an outspoken critic of GSK’s diabetes treatment.
He said: “If you treated 60 people for a year with Avandia, you would cause one extra case of heart attack, stroke, heart failure or death, compared to if you had treated 60 patients with Takeda’s Actos.”
The second study appeared in the Archives of Internal Medicine – an update to analysis carried out three years ago, concluded Avandia “greatly raises the risk of heart attacks and cardiovascular deaths”.
That study’s author, Steven Nissen of the Cleveland Clinic, said the new analysis pools results from 52 studies and produced the same results as his initial meta-analysis conducted in 2007.
It compared patients who took Avandia with those who took Actos and found people taking Avandia had 1.25 times the risk of heart failure compared with those taking Actos, 1.27 times the risk of a stroke and 1.14 times the risk of dying.
“I think what we can say confidently is, looking at the totality of data in 2010, Avandia increases the risk of heart attack compared to other diabetes drugs by about a third,” Nissen concluded.
Nissen started the Avandia debate in 2007 with his first meta-analysis, pooling data from dozens of studies, most of them funded by GSK, with a study in the New England Journal of Medicine that suggested the drug significantly raised the risk of a heart attack.
But positive results at American Diabetes Association meeting
The UK-based pharma company was quick to try and dispel the new data with a new third study, released at the American Diabetes Association’s annual meeting in Orlando, that shows diabetics taking Avandia were 28% less likely to die or have a heart attack or stroke compared with patients who did not take a drug in its class.
This study concluded that Avandia did not raise the risk of heart failure, although patients who took Avandia did have a higher risk of bone fracture.
Ben Adams
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