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Merck's Drug Propecia Linked To Sexual Dysfunction
zaxios writes "Merck — the pharmaceutical giant previously featured on Slashdot for drawing up a 'hit list' of doctors that criticized its drug Vioxx, and creating a fake medical journal to endorse its products — is embroiled in a new scandal. USA Today is reporting on two new studies that show Propecia, Merck's $250 million prescription medication for baldness, can make men irreversibly impotent. Lawsuits have been filed in the United States and Canada from men claiming to have permanently lost their sexual function after taking the drug. All this is reminiscent of Merck's difficulties with Vioxx, a once $2.5-billion-a-year drug, which was withdrawn from the market in 2004 after a study showed it doubled the risk of heart attack and stroke in users."
...Propecia is an anti-androgen! Duh.
You take a pill to cure baldness, ostensibly because you find your lack of hair hampers your ability to get laid. But after taking the pills you end up with a full head of hair and maybe even a woman because of it, and you're unable to perform?
Seems like you're damned if you do, damned if you dont...
"So after all this, you make my case for me. To end this stalemate, you must die..."
Self-confidence, social ability, and how you dress are more important than your hair.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
20 years ago, I knew a lady who worked at Merck, about the time Propecia was "discovered". In reality, it was developed as a drug for another purpose (something to do with the prostate) and the hair growth was a side effect. She, and no other females, were allowed in the production area, as exposure caused irreversible infertility in females, and it was really bad for pregnant women.
the moral is, don't mess with your health if you can avoid it. we just don't know enough yet.....
I'm transsexual and take testosterone blockers in order to help feminise my body, and changes in sex drive were quite noticeable. Propecia's active substance, finasteride, is essentially a testosterone blocker ( thou admittedly a weaker one than what I am taking ) so I'm not at all surprised it can have such side effects.
With all the side effects these newer drugs seem to have (rushed warning at the end of the commercials, full page ads with a full page warning on the opposite side) and their cost and dubious effectiveness I really have to wonder how sane people are.
Put him in charge of the FDA
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
There's a similar problem with women's birth control pills:
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/35663.php
Messing with hormones could also alter the sort of people you find attractive:
http://www.livescience.com/2781-pill-women-pick-bad-mates.html
I think it's pretty unreasonable to expect that a pharma be able to test for all possible side affects of a given medication. Some of them don't seem to have side affects related to their main effect, so the scope of the test to look for all possible effects would have to be so broad it'd result in subject fatigue.
However, I present that in the hypothetical context of pharma operating in good faith. That is, I wouldn't want to hold up a potentially life saving drug just cause I had to test for every possible side effect, including very subjective ones.
In the current state, pharma isn't acting in good faith. They aggressively push drugs onto patients and doctors that don't really need them, their drugs may not work as claimed, and they don't seem to be acting out of medical principle so much as a "throw it against the wall" method of benefit discovery.
So therefore, I don't believe they should have the benefit of operating in good faith, and should be held accountable for everything that they do. If they want to have the license to operate in a free market, they should have to accept the liability of their aggressive risk taking too. If they weren't so aggressive in taking risk, I'd cut them more slack for the rare screwup. But I don't think they deserve that latitude any more.
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$tar -xvf
I'm transsexual and take testosterone blockers in order to help feminise my body, and changes in sex drive were quite noticeable. Propecia's active substance, finasteride, is essentially a testosterone blocker ( thou admittedly a weaker one than what I am taking ) so I'm not at all surprised it can have such side effects.
Same, though I'm on both finasteride and spironolactone. This is very much a desirable side effect for us. =)
I just hope that this doesn't result in a massive recall and them stopping making it. Finasteride in higher doses is used as part of a prostate cancer treatment regimen for analogous reasons to this "side effect", so hopefully the drug won't go away completely.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Unfortunately it only grows pubic hair. Would have been a hit in the 70s, but these days...
This space available.
My other reason for cutting it all off was that I have exceptionally oily skin and it's much easier to get all the sebaceous cysts cut out with short hair, and I get a bunch of cool scars :)
FINALLY! I thought a thread related to sexual function was bound to have some sexy anecdotes, but it took until this to find one.
This space available.
Keyboarding, man!
Impotent WoW players have twice the keyboarding speed as regular WoW players. That's just unfair!
Really needs to DIAF. I mean sure, if the drug company lies? Bust their asses, shut them down. but too many drugs, drugs that can save lives and make folks lives better, are being taken off the market not by lies but by douches that don't follow directions and that is total bullshit! If my doc explains the pros and cons of a drug and I agree to take it it should be between my doc and myself not some ambulance chasing scumbag!
I had this one personally bite me in the ass in the 80s. There was a drug called Tegison which was like a miracle cure for the form of psoriatic arthritis that left me crippled after a traumatic bike wreck triggered the recessive gene and caused my immune system to go haywire. No side effects, it was like heaven.
So what happened? Simple before they would even give you the drug you had to watch 30 minutes worth of films and sign a ton of agreements agreeing not to have children because it would cause flipper babies, so a couple of stupid whores watched the films, signed the papers and promptly got knocked up and then sued the company right out of existence by popping out a couple of mutants.
It didn't matter what they saw or signed, all it took was some scumbag lawyer showing pics of horribly fucked up kids (even though it was the bitch's fault and she should have been thrown in jail for doing that to a kid) and he got them an assload of money. Next thing you know OTHER women are showing up wanting a check (which means I have no doubt they purposely got preg on the drug to cash in) and the company simply quit making it rather than risk more suits. My pharmacist was nice enough to buy every single box he could possibly find when he heard, even going so far as to contact drug suppliers in South America, but eventually it dried up and it was nearly 6 years before they found anything else that would work.
That is 6 YEARS of pain I wouldn't have had to go through if those bitches and their leech wouldn't have been able to pull that shit (may they die of cancer) so it is time for some REAL reforms! I propose that there be an ironclad "no suing, do not pass go, GTFO" contract that any doctor be allowed to use with a drug, so bullshit lawsuits like the one that hurt me end for good. There were people willing to take the risk for what Vioxx did for them too, now they get to suffer thanks to a leech.
Whether a drug is worth the risk for the benefits should be up to the PATIENT, not some damned ambulance chaser!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Propecia is an antiandrogen, and has always been known to cause sexual dysfunction while the user was on the drug. What's significant about these new studies is that they show that sexual dysfunction can persist AFTER you stop taking Propecia. That contradicts what Merck has always said - their product guidance warns of sexual side effects but expressly states that they always stop after ceasing the drug - and the advice that doctors give to patients considering taking Propecia. That's why there's a lawsuit - no one was ever warned that these sexual side effects might be permanent.
In fact, it remains a mystery how the drug could have this effect: its half life is only a few days, and it really should be ceasing any effect within that time. At least one doctor (Dr Alan Jacobs, a neuroendocrinologist in NYC) is speculating that Propecia is inducing permanent changes to the expression of genes governing the androgen system. IANAD so I express no view on that.
If you want to learn more about this issue, go to propeciahelp.com. There are people there who have been suffering from post-Propecia symptoms - not just sexual dysfunction, but other symptoms associated with low testosterone like cognitive impairment, fatigue, etc - for upwards of 10 years after stopping Propecia. If that's not worth a big payout from a pharma company that expressly told that that all side effects would cease after taking the medication, I'm not sure what is.
Your story is an excellent case for the policy of informed consent. As long as everyone knows what the risks are, people should be free to take the drugs.
Who cares if Vioxx increased your chance of a heart attack by a small amount? ("Doubling" the risk is much scarier than saying it raises your risk by 1% or whatever.) If the patient UNDERSTANDS the risk, and no better drugs exist, he should be able to take his Vioxx or whatever. It's called a black-label warning, and the FDA does it all the time. But nothing helps if the drug gets pulled off the market.
I know about this, because my landlord at the time (an old Korean war vet) suffered excruciating pain from arthritis in his spine. He started on Vioxx and became a functional individual again. When they pulled it from the market, it was like literally chopping his legs off. Not one other painkiller really worked for him, except morphine. So he was put on morphine, and spent 17 hours a day sleeping. I asked him if he'd trade a 1% chance of a heart attack in exchange for getting his life back, and his response was something along the lines of "Yes, in a second. I spend all day sleeping now - I'd like to have my life back, even if it means a slight risk."
Naderites love to claim that their lawsuits keep the evil big corporations in line, not thinking about the harm they cause to the little guys.
Of course, after the whole Vioxx debacle played out, they found that all COX-blockers increase the risk of heart problems (due to shared receptors, IIRC, on the heart). But other companies just slapped a black-label warning on their Celebrex or whatever, and kept selling it.
Every drug has to be a miracle cure, with no ill effects or risks (discovered or undiscovered)
Or someone's going to get sued.
Seems to me the deck's stacked against the drug companies... now...
Is it worth it to continue work on cancer curing drugs, when you're just going to get sued over them -- because they're less than 100% effective, or because they make people look fat or reduce sexual performance and people hate looking fat and hate lower sexual performance?
If the treatment of the drug is important to you, you will take it, in exchange for the risks (both known and unknown risks). If it's not you won't.
In a sane country, the drug companies would be safe from being sued unless there was actual misconduct on their part that you could prove, such as falsifying results of their study, or telling a known lie to the FDA in approval process, or in their advertising -- for example, representing a product as FDA approved if it was not actually approved.