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There is a reasonable expectation that pharmaceutical companies will put medications on the market only after thorough and extensive testing and will do so only if they are safe. However, that’s not always the case. This puts people’s health at risk and can lead to alarming consequences. Learn more about some of the drugs that have caused serious or fatal side effects.
Pharmaceutical companies develop medications to treat a variety of conditions, from arthritis to cancer. Unfortunately, these drugs aren’t always as safe as their manufacturers claim they are. In some cases, taking these medications can lead to severe side effects or even death.
Major pharmaceutical companies release medications to consumers before adequately testing them often resulting in severely harmful side effects. As consumers, we trust pharmaceutical companies to develop medications that will help treat our medical conditions and not make them worse or cause other unrelated side effects.
When a manufacturer develops and sells a dangerous drug, the effects of the drug usually impact many lives. For this reason, these matters are often handled as class action lawsuits. A class action lawsuit is a lawsuit in which multiple people join together against a specific defendant with the same complaint.
There are hundreds of bad drugs on the market today and each year thousands of consumers file lawsuits against the manufacturers responsible.
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, also known as SSRIs, work by correcting chemical imbalances in the brain. Expecting mothers who took certain types of these SSRIs have been shown to have a greater likelihood of delivering a baby with birth defects – most of which are severe.
SSRIs are used to treat serious, continuing depression that interferes with a person’s ability to function. Like other antidepressant drugs, they help reduce the extreme sadness, hopelessness, and lack of interest in life that are typical in people with depression.
In some instances, SSRIs have been shown to increase the chance of a certain defect by 600 percent. SSRI medications include:
Studies have indicated that the use of SSRI antidepressants, including Zoloft, during pregnancy can cause a significantly increased likelihood of severe birth defects. Some of these birth defects include:
Pradaxa is a blood-thinning medicine created by Boehringer Ingelheim. It was approved by the FDA in 2010 to prevent strokes associated with atrial fibrillation (“fluttering” heart rhythm).
Pradaxa reduces the risk of ischemic strokes by inhibiting thrombin, an enzyme that is necessary for the formation of blood clots.
In January 2014, the FDA launched a study to compare the bleeding risks of Pradaxa and Warfarin.
In May 2014, the agency issued a Safety Communication to warn that Pradaxa was associated with a 28% higher rate of gastrointestinal bleeding than Warfarin, but lower rates of stroke and death, and similar rates of heart attack.
Xarelto is a blood thinner used to help treat and prevent blood clots. Janssen Pharmaceuticals of Johnson & Johnson submitted the drug Xarelto for approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2011. The drug was approved for preventing deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolisms in patients undergoing hip or knee arthroplasty.
Promising the convenience of freedom from dietary restrictions and the need to constantly monitor blood levels, Xarelto was one of the first major torts in 2015, due to the misleading marketing and severe side effects associated with the drug.
The FDA issued a Black Box warning in 2012. A Black Box warning label is reserved for medications that pose a high risk of serious or life-threatening side effects to patients. Unfortunately, the drug was not removed from the market after receiving a black box label putting thousands of patients at risk.
Patients who took Xarelto suffered from serious and even life-threatening side effects, including:
Tepezza is a medication manufactured by Horizon Therapeutics and approved by the FDA in 2020 to treat thyroid eye disease (TED). Immediately after hitting the U.S. market, doctors and patients began reporting significant hearing damage. A post-market study on Tepezza was published in 2021, showing that Horizon grossly understated the risk of hearing damage associated with Tepezza during the FDA approval process.
Depo-Provera, a progestin-based birth control shot manufactured by Pfizer, may put users at risk of meningiomas, which are brain and spinal tumors that can cause serious health complications. Pfizer failed to disclose these risks to Depo-Provera users, leaving long-term users five times more likely to develop meningiomas.
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