Prescriptions for Avandia have dropped about 10% since The New England Journal of Medicine posted a study suggesting the diabetes drug increases heart attack risk, GlaxoSmithKline representatives said Monday.
Before the journal posted the study May 21, U.S. doctors were writing about 240,000 prescriptions per week, Glaxo spokeswoman Alice Hunt says. That has dropped to about 215,000 to 220,000 per week. Glaxo estimates the number of people taking Avandia has dropped from about 1 million to 900,000 in the USA.
New prescriptions have dropped about 40% since the study by Steven Nissen, chief of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, was posted, says Glaxo's Chris Viehbacher, president of U.S. pharmaceuticals. New prescriptions are defined as the first prescription a doctor wrote for a patient who might already have been taking the drug under a different doctor's care.
Prior to Nissen's study, U.S. doctors wrote about 80,000 new Avandia prescriptions weekly; that number has dropped to about 55,000, Hunt says.
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