Dec 14 2011
Synthetic HRT cases now in the courts
Women who developed breast cancer after using synthetic hormones have won their court cases against the big pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Wyeth, winning $72.6 in compensation. These women developed breast cancer after taking synthetic hormone therapy which include synthetic drugs such as Prempro used to treat their menopause symptoms.
It is surprising that doctors are still prescribing synthetic hormones to women who are experiencing severe menopause symptoms such as hot flashes when all the dangers of synthetic hormones have been known since the Women’s Health Initiative found that synthetic hormone replacement therapy increased the risks of breast cancer, so much so that the study was ended abruptly. If your doctor prescribes synthetic hormones for your menopause symptoms, run, don’t walk away from his office and find a doctor with more current knowledge.
To combat severe menopausal symptoms safely, doctors should be prescribing natural bio-identical hormone therapy in either static or biomimetic fashion. Bio-identical hormones have been used in Europe almost 60 years now with successful and safe results. The following news article is written by Jon Campisi and first appeared in the Pennsylvania Record. Interesting to note also is that there are still 932 hormone replacement therapy cases still pending in the Pennsylvania court system.
“Phila. jury awards $72.6 million to plaintiffs in Pfizer hormone replacement therapy case
Three plaintiffs in a consolidated mass tort trial who had alleged their respective breast cancer diagnoses were directly related to their ingestion of hormone therapy medications have won the first part of their quest to hold a pharmaceutical giant responsible for their conditions.
A Philadelphia Common Pleas Court jury Tuesday awarded the three women a collective $72.6 million in compensatory damages in their case against the drug manufacturer Pfizer, according to the law firm representing the plaintiffs.
The women had alleged that they each had developed breast cancer after taking hormone therapy drugs such as Prempro, which was designed to treat their menopause symptoms.
After a trial in front of Common Pleas Court Judge Gary S. Glazer, the jury awarded $20 million to Elfont, $27.85 million to Kalenkoski and $24.75 million to Mulderig, according to the plaintiffs’ attorneys.
The company’s spokesman, Chris Loder, didn’t return a message seeking 
comment Wednesday from the Pennsylvania Record, but he was quoted in a statement distributed to local media as saying that the drug manufacturer will most likely continue its legal fight. “Hormone therapy medicines are an important treatment option for many women with debilitating symptoms of menopause,” the statement continued. “The FDA has regularly and thoroughly reviewed the benefits and risks of these medicines, and states that ‘hormone therapy is the most effective FDA-approved medicine for relief of hot flashes, night sweats or vaginal dryness.’”
Elfont, 66, a former Northeast Philadelphia resident, had taken hormone therapy drugs for two-plus years before she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1997.
Kalenkoski, 68, who was diagnosed with the disease in 2002, had taken the menopause medication Prempro for more than four years, and Mulderig, also 68, ingested Premarin and Provera for 11 years before she received her breast cancer diagnosis.
According to a Bloomberg News report, Pfizer’s Wyeth and Upjohn units have lost 10 out of the 18 hormone therapy cases against them in civil court trials since 2006.
This spring, Pfizer announced that it had settled a third of the pending Prempro cases, of which the pharmaceutical giant had set aside $772 for the claims, Bloomberg reported.
The statement by the plaintiffs’ attorney’s said this case was “one of thousands of Prempro cases that has kept the Pfizer legal team busy. In an SEC filing in May, the company said it had set aside $300 million to cover pending litigation.”
In its statement, Pfizer said of all trial-set hormone therapy cases that have been resolved for either party, 44 have come out in the company’s favor “through a combination of rulings by judges, jury verdicts and dismissals by plaintiffs themselves to avoid going to trial. Nine juries have found for Wyeth, including six of the last eight; and there are eight final judgments for Wyeth.
It wasn’t until a decade ago that the risks associated with the hormone therapy drugs were made public in a study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.
A Women’s Health Initiative report released early last decade found that women taking hormone replacement therapy drugs experienced an increased risk in developing breast cancer.
Prempro and Premarin, the two most commonly prescribed forms of hormone replacement therapy, saw their steepest decline in 2002 and 2003, after the study’s findings were published, from 61 million prescriptions written in 2001 to 21 million in 2004, according to the National Institutes of Health.
The New England Journal of Medicine reported in a 2007 published study that age-adjusted breast cancer incidence rates in American women fell 6.7 percent in 2003, the same time period for which hormone replacement therapy prescriptions drastically fell.
This article first appeared in the PennRecord
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