"I know of no evidence that Redux, given by itself, causes heart valve damage, " Wurtman says.
In 1997, the weight-loss drugs fenfluramine and dexfenfluramine were withdrawn from the market after evidence emerged that they caused heart valve damage.
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These medicines, fenfluramine and dexfenfluramine, caused heart valve damage when used alone and with another drug, phentermine, in the infamous fen-phen combo.
Its APD356 is far more specific, and so far the heart valve damage that led to fen-phen's withdrawal has not reared its head.
That's what happened with fen-phen, where Wyeth was swamped with far more expensive cases of heart-valve damage than lawyers--or scientific knowledge--would have suggested was possible.
Arena's drug, lorcaserin, was born out of one of the drug industry's greatest disasters: Redux, or fenfluramine, a Wyeth medicine that was yanked from the market after it was found to cause heart valve damage.
Valvulopathy has been the main safety worry for lorcaserin from the start, because the drug was designed to hit the same receptor as the diet drug fenfluramine, which was withdrawn because it caused heart valve damage.
For example, tens of thousands of asbestos claimants probably have lungs injured from smoking, not asbestos--and physicians were accused of deliberately fiddling with the controls to make echocardiograms look like heart-valve damage to collect more money from the fen-phen trust.
It was feared that the lake would pour over the top and burst down the valley but fortunately the river gouged out an escape route along the side of the landblock which acted as a safety valve and limited the damage.
Without this safety valve, generators would overload and begin shutting down to avoid damage, risking a domino effect of a region-wide outage.
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