{"id":210016,"date":"2010-01-21T16:32:13","date_gmt":"2010-01-21T21:32:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.wsj.com\/health\/2010\/01\/21\/meridia-another-diet-drug-warning\/"},"modified":"2010-01-21T16:32:13","modified_gmt":"2010-01-21T21:32:13","slug":"meridia-another-diet-drug-warning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/210016","title":{"rendered":"Meridia: Another Diet-Drug Warning"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Meridia\"It’s been a tough week for diet drugs. First, there were warnings<\/a> that some people going to online auction sites to buy GlaxoSmithKline’s Alli weren’t getting the real thing. Instead, they were getting a counterfeit version that actually used the active ingredient from another diet drug — Abbott’s Meridia. <\/p>\n

Today, it’s Meridia’s turn for trouble. European regulators said the drug — known generically as sibutramine, and sold in the EU under the brand names Reductil, Reduxade and Zelium — should be pulled from the market<\/a>. In the U.S., the FDA said<\/a> the drug shouldn’t be taken by patients with a history of heart disease — a significant limitation for a diet drug, given the link between heart disease and obesity.<\/p>\n

At issue is a study<\/a> that suggested the drug increased the risk of cardiovascular events (heart attack, stroke, that sort of thing) for people who already had heart trouble. Overall, 11.4% of the patients in the study who took the drug had cardiovascular events, compared with 10% who took a placebo. You can see how the subgroups break out in the table at the bottom of this page<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Abbott wasn’t immediately available for comment, Dow Jones Newswires said<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Bonus Diet<\/strong>: Read about the failure of diet drugs that work on cannabinoid receptors<\/a> in the brain — a once-promising class of medicines that didn’t work out for Sanofi-Aventis, Merck or Pfizer.<\/p>\n

Photo: Bloomberg News<\/em><\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s been a tough week for diet drugs. First, there were warnings that some people going to online auction sites to buy GlaxoSmithKline’s Alli weren’t getting the real thing. Instead, they were getting a counterfeit version that actually used the active ingredient from another diet drug — Abbott’s Meridia. Today, it’s Meridia’s turn for trouble. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":650,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-210016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/650"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210016\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}