Plaintiffs filed more than 350 products liability cases last month in Delaware state court against AstraZeneca over their anti-psychotic drug Seroquel -- a surge exceeding the total number of cases filed there in the last two years.
Plaintiffs counsel may be trying to force AstraZeneca into an early settlement of the Delaware cases that would influence the settlement of the rest of the litigation -- and avoid the federal multidistrict litigation (MDL) in Tampa, Fla. -- because Delaware is on a fast track for trial and discovery.
The litigation arose from a label change ordered by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in September 2003, indicating that Seroquel users are at heightened risk of contracting diabetes. No link has been proven, but plaintiffs who took the drug before that date have claimed injury and say they were not adequately warned of this risk.
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It is interesting that AstraZeneca
along withh Eli Lilly gets away with making atypical antipsychotics that increase the risk of diabetes in patients and also sit on the information they have that is advancing paternal age the is the cause of a large portion of sporadic schizophrenia in the first place. Does AstraZeneca have a long-term strategy to pay buckets of money along with the other Pharmas to perpetuate the myth of the benign lack of a male biologial clock?
Has this fine researcher been bought off by lavish industry perks and high paying important jobs in academia by the pharmaceutical industry? She does not speak out and warn the public and instead is a proponent of the pharma/NARSAD/NAMI party line of not wanting to make older fathers- to-be, anxious or the to make older fathers with autistic or schizophrenic children feel guilty.
Dr. Dolores Malaspina, Chair of the NYU Department of Psychiatry:
"The most irrefutable finding is our demonstration that a father’s age is a major risk factor for schizophrenia. We were the first group to show that schizophrenia is linearly related to paternal age and that the risk is tripled for the offspring of the oldest groups of fathers.7 This finding has been born out in every single cohort study that has looked at paternal age and the risk for schizophrenia. The only other finding that has been as consistently replicated in schizophrenia research is that there is an increased risk associated with a family history of schizophrenia. Since only 10% to 15% of schizophrenia cases have a family history, family history does not explain much of the population risk for schizophrenia. However, we think that approximately one third or one quarter of all schizophrenia cases may be attributable to paternal age. Paternal age is the major source of de novo genetic diseases in the human population, which was first described by Penrose8 in the 1950s. He hypothesized that this was due to copy errors that arose in the male germ line over the many cycles of sperm cell replications. These mutations accumulate as paternal age advances. After the Penrose report, medical researchers identified scores of sporadic diseases in the offspring of older fathers, suggesting that these could occur from gene mutations. Particular attention was paid to conditions in last-born children. In the 1960s, an excess of schizophrenia in last-born children was also reported."
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