A paper (a study by Dr. Steven Nissen and Kathy Wolski ) to be published in the June 14, 2007 print copy of New England Journal of Medicine (copy of the paper is now available online) mentioned that the use of rosiglitazone raises risk of heart attack by 43% .

  

Once we suffered from a Merck & Co which marketed Vioxx which contained Rofecoxib, a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID).  Though Rofecoxib was approved as safe and effective by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on May 20, 1999 On September 30, 2004, Merck voluntarily withdrew rofecoxib from the market because of concerns about increased risk of heart attack and stroke associated with long-term, high-dosage use.

 

And now it is Avandia marketed by the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline which contained Rosiglitazone is an anti-diabetic drug from the thiazolidinedione class is troubling people.

 

Recent research has pointed out that Rosiglitazone may be of improvement to a division of sufferers of Alzheimer's disease (expressing the allelle gene ApoE4). The ambiguity started revealing when a press release (on February 2007) by GlaxoSmithKline noted that rosiglitazone intake may cause a greater frequency of fractures of the upper arms, hands and feet in female diabetics than metformin or glyburide. A paper (a study by Dr. Steven Nissen and Kathy Wolski ) to be published in the June 14, 2007 print copy of New England Journal of Medicine (copy of the paper is now available online) mentioned that the use of rosiglitazone raises risk of heart attack by 43% . The FDA issued an alert on May 21, 2007 which cautioned the intake of the drug.

The real data of the investigation goes as - 15,560 patients were given Avandia and another 12,283 were kept as ‘control group’ (which was used as a standard) Comparing with the results of already published studies, Dr. Nissen found that there were 86 myocardial infarctions in the grouping that took rosiglitzone (as Avandia) compared to 72 in the control group.

Also with regard to the number of deaths from heart disease, there were 39 in number among people who took the drug, compared to 22 for the control group. A few deaths out of more than 15,000 subjects may seem as a pretty low number, but it should be noted that the study was a short-term.

The results made the prize of the company’s market shares to go down.

Though the company denied various allegations and even criticized the way the study was conducted; the note released by the company itself shows that the drug is having lots of side effects that may even prove fatal.