Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Maybe goodbye to some good drugs
It seems as though we may be saying a farewell to a whole class of drugs in the near future. The COX-2 group will be sorely missed by many patients with rheumatoid arthritis and other inflammatory arthropathies. They really did reduce these patients' risk of gastrointestinal bleeding. I hope we find some sort of compassionate need availability for these people.
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2 comments:
I hate to look as if I'm looking for free doctoring -- and I'm not, really ... just looking for an informed comment or two. All I've gotten from the general news is that the COX-2 drugs are supposed to increase their users' risk of stroke, heart attack, etc. What I wonder is, how much increased is such risk, numerically? I mean, if your baseline probability of a disastrous outcome in any given year is, say, 0.020, and a COX-2 drug increases that to 0.080, that's one thing; if the annual risk increases to 0.022, who cares? (Even though a news story might then correctly say that the risk of the bad outcome has "increased by 10%!")
Also, is naproxen implicated? (Legitimately, that is?)
Interesting blog. Thanks for putting it out.
You are right on target in your assessment of the situation. I think that you'll read more about this in coming days with the other good news (as far as I'm concerned) coming out of the FDA's COX-2 advisory panel (see http://dugkar.blogspot.com/2005/02/mercks-vioxx-safe-to-be-sold.html ) regarding these drugs.
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