Glaxo Unsure of Which Patients Suitable for Lotronex
Sorry I didn’t get this news out to you sooner….Lotronex was just pulled off the market by the FDA. Remember, functional medicine practitioners have been treating IBS very successfully for many years now using various natural methods.
(article) Many patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) alternate between the two main forms of the disease, Glaxo Wellcome said on Thursday as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) continued to investigate 70 reports of adverse events and five deaths in women taking the company’s IBS drug Lotronex. As of October 20, the FDA had received 49 reports of ischemic colitis, a condition in which blood flow to the colon is reduced, and 21 reports of severe constipation in women taking Lotronex (alosetron) for IBS. Five of these 70 women died, FDA spokesman Jason Brodsky said. A Glaxo spokesman denied a causal link had been established between the adverse events and the drug, which has been taken by some 300,000 women in the US since its launch in March, but which has not yet been approved in Europe. The spokesman told Reuters Health that some women had been misdiagnosed and prescribed Lotronex when they had the constipation-predominant form of IBS rather than diarrhea-predominant form for which the drug is indicated. According to the spokesman, a correct diagnosis is not straightforward because many patients — possibly as many as a third of all IBS patients — alternate between the two types.