What Drug Did Doctors Prescribe Most Last Year? - Health Blog - WSJ

By Katherine Hobson

Generics are king.

That’s the message from the  latest report on U.S. medication use by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, which found that non-branded drugs now make up 78% of all prescriptions dispensed.

There are only three name-brand drugs on the list of the most commonly prescribed medications: Pfizer’s Lipitor, at #12; Sanofi-Aventis’s and Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Plavix, at #23 and Merck’s Singulair, at #25. And all three are due to lose patent protection this year or next. (The report also says that within 6 months of patent loss, generics take 80% of prescription share.)

The year’s runaway favorite drug was, once again, hydrocodone/acetaminophen, the generic form of the painkiller Vicodin. More than 131 million prescriptions were dispensed last year, about 37 million more than the second-most popular drug, the generic anti-cholesterol drug simvastatin.

The list of top-selling drugs by dollars, of course, is made up entirely of brand-name drugs, with Lipitor, AstraZeneca’s Nexium, Plavix, GlaxoSmithKline’s Advair Diskus and Bristol-Myers’s and Otsuka America’s Abilify as Nos. 1-5. (Forbes’s Matthew Herper wonders how Nexium, “the poster child for me-too medicines,” managed to generate $6.3 billion in sales.)

Overall, spending on medicines rose to more than $307 billion, up just 2.3%. Here’s the Dow Jones Newswires story about the report.

via blogs.wsj.com

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