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Doctors who led three studies showing prescription painkillers called COX-2 inhibitors raise the risk of heart attacks and strok

admin2012-10-20  44
问题      Doctors who led three studies showing prescription painkillers called COX-2 inhibitors raise the risk of heart attacks and stroke said Tuesday the whole class of drugs was in danger of being pulled from the market.
     One day before a Food and Drug Administration panel begins discussing the future of such drugs, the New England Journal of Medicine published details of three studies stopped early because patients taking the drugs were having more heart attacks, strokes and other adverse events than patients not taking them.
     "I think we are at risk of losing the class of drugs," said Dr. Robert Bresalier of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, who was studying one of the drugs, Vioxx, known generically as rofecoxib, in a colon cancer trial. Merck & Co. Inc. withdrew Vioxx in September after learning the results of Bresalier’s trial, which showed Vioxx almost doubled the risk of heart attacks, strokes and other major adverse events. Bresalier told reporters his trial also showed Vioxx worked at least as well as aspirin to prevent colon cancer. That data will be published later this year, he said. He and other experts said those benefits would need to be weighed against the potential risks. "I think the loss of some of these drugs will create a void," he told reporters in a telephone briefing.
     But Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, said that since there were well-established alternatives to those drugs, "it is reasonable to ask whether the use of the drugs can now be justified." The drugs are sold mainly for long-term pain relief in arthritis and other conditions,
     In a second report published by the journal, Dr. Scott Solomon and colleagues at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School found Pfizer Inc. ’s Celebrex doubled or even tri- pled deaths from heart attack, stroke or heart failure, depending on the dose. Their study involved more than 2,000 patients who were also taking the drug to see if it could prevent colon cancer.
     In a third report, Dr. Nancy Nussmeier of the Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in Houston and colleagues detailed their study using a third agent, Pfizer’s Bextra, in heart surgery patients. They found that 7.4 percent of those given the drugs had an adverse event——such as heart attacks, kidney failure, ulcers and complications of wound healing compared with 4 percent of those given placebo alone.
     The studies are among several others showing the drugs raise heart risks.
Why did Merck & Co. Inc. pulled Vioxx from the market this September.
选项 A、Because they learned the results of Dr. Jeffery Draze’s trail.
B、Because Vioxx has proved a useless drug in trails.
C、Because trails showed that Vioxx almost doubled the risk of heart attacks, strokes and other major adverse events.
D、Because Merck&Co. Inc. could not make any money from the drug.
答案C
解析 细节题。文章第三段第三行提到公司从市场上撤出的原因是因为实验表明服用的病人，其患心脏病、中风以及引发其它负面作用的机率增加两倍。
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