Lawsuits Allege Antipsychotic Medications Caused Noticeable Breast Growth in Men

[TigerPaws]

Lawsuits Allege Antipsychotic Medications Caused Noticeable Breast Growth in Men

By David Mittleman January 08, 2010 10:27 AM

According to 10 lawsuits recently filed in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, boys and young men who took the antipsychotic drugs Risperdal and Invega suffered from serious side effects including rapid weight gain and the growth of large breasts up to a size 38D.

The attorney, Mr. Stephen Sheller, who filed the suits stated that he plans to file at least 20 to 30 similar cases in Philadelphia in the next two months against Janssen, a division of the Ortho-McNeil-Janssen pharmaceutical company, which is also affiliated with Johnson & Johnson. Sheller also alleges that doctors may not have taken some of his clients seriously when they complained of their breast growth because of simultaneous weight gain.

Risperdal and Invega are antipsychotic medications with similar chemical structures and side effects. Risperdal is FDA-approved for the treatment of schizophrenia, bipolar mania, and symptoms of autism. However, the drug is also prescribed off-label to treat other problems such as attention deficit disorder, Tourette syndrome or disruptive behavior. According to Mr. Kenneth Smith, a Alexandria, Virginia attorney working with Mr. Sheller on the cases, both drugs are prescribed off-label to at least 70% of all patients who take the medications. Most of the patients in the Philadelphia cases took the medications off-label. Most of the suits accuse the drug company of negligence and fraud for failing to adequately warn doctors and patients of the drugs' side effects. Some of the suits also allege that the company actively promoted off-label use of the drugs.

[siphon]

Kudos for the lawsuit! Pharmaceutical negligence for profit has been exploited enough, hopefully this has positive impacts for everyone involved

[Alchemist]

Hi TigerPaws,

So what is new?  Looking at the list of medications, and herbs, and foods, and unknowns that can cause breast enlargement in men I have to say that had I ruled out all the things that might cause breast enlargement, my conditions would have been untreatable.  At least half the meds I've taken in the last 40 years have that possibility.  It would appear that not one has actually made any difference but sitting with a pair of DDs since post puberty would it matter and would I notice the difference?  Recent stories about keeping ones hair on the head indicates sexual problems as well as breast enlargement.  The sexual problems would concern me but at this point minor differences in breast size matter not at all.


I have over time eliminated more than 50 meds over time because of unbearable side effects.  So now with these meds with a list of side effects that is long, after suing they will what, achieve getting a listing for "enlarged male breasts" as a side effect?  I haven't noticed multi-million dollar payouts for having side effects being the norm much less non injurious non fatal non-damaging side effects.  Since that is all the attorneys are chasing this will just add millions more to all of our medical costs.  If they get millions for enlarged breasts as a side effect I ought to get millions and millions for the damage the pseudo vitamin folic acid did to me, almost killed me from congestive heart failure from a screwed up metabolism from the unusable folate.  And as far as psychological damage goes, being made to be fat and bloated all my life from the fake vitamin certainly caused psychological damage as well as physical damage.  I'm about 20 pounds from my ideal weight, 115 pounds below what I was a few years ago, fighting this battle all my life which started when I ate Special K with all those vitamins including cyanocbl and folic acid.  With the proper nutrition it is all just melting away, no fight at all.  Good information is needed about side effects and that is the problem of the current system, it doesn't pick up on that quickly enough.  The entire system needs reform including very specifically side effect tracking.  Until the system is fixed this kind of info will lag decades behind the drug usage.  

I happened to get gyne at puberty in the months following starting folic acid and cyanocbl.  lack of real b12 and real folate can cause all sorts of cell growth and hormonal abnormalities and may be a cause of gyne.  A case could also be made for onset in a person's 50s as the ability to absorb b12 from food falls away and people become deficient and loss of testosterone in men from lack of b12.  My testosterone fell through the floor at 39 when I went into severe b12 and folate deficiencies at 39 because I was taking the vitamin forms of folic acid and cyanocbl.  Now if some attorneys want to aid getting a possible cause recognized maybe suing everybody in sight might work or might not.

I am collecting data on this aspect currently to see if it pans out as a cause.

[TigerPaws]

Alchemist

While I generally agree the big issue is big Pharma, in the recent Glaxo Smith Kline settlement (which was in the billions) proof came forward from a 6 year DOJ investigation that 80% of American physicians were and are in some way taking bribes or payoffs to prescribe specific medications.

This is now an indisputable fact.

How can we are consumers trust what we are being told is necessary for our health when this kind and level of corruption is so prevalent? The odds of your or any other physician being on the virtual payroll of some pharmaceutical company is very great.

Is it any wonder that so many suffer from so many health related issues? While I like the legal profession as much as a case of the clap, how else are we as consumers who are paying for a service going to learn of such corruption? 

 

[Alchemist]

Hi TigerPaws,

I have worked and consulted in group health care since 1979.  I did a lot of chasing down of fraud on the office level and "mistakes" in the hospital bills, for instance, somebody off oral being billed for duplicate oral meds and injected meds on the same days.  And then there is the $5 asprin.  However, we never got into the payment of docs for drug prescribing though we were aware of it and it was prohibited in HMOs in which docs were employees.  We also did look at prescribing looking for abnormalities in prescribing patterns.

The problems with the research and pharmaceutical marketing are multitude. In reviewing journal articles, many of them have such obvious errors or manipulations of data or other peculiarities (as I saw it put a couple of days ago "shoddy statistics") that would have caused a high school chem lab report to be flunked.  I have had to ask doesn't anybody actually read these things, studies leading to drug licensing I mean.  These were not subtle mistakes or manipulations that could hardly be noticed.  For instance one famous brand of pain medication showed the most powerful pill had an AUC of about 1800 with a suitable peak.  The graph however showed ab AUC of 1300 or so and was used by marketing to show how "flat" the curve was, indicating how smooth the pain relief was.  It was an illusion of course, created by chopping off that high peak.  That isn't even to mention much bigger violations, the creation of non-existant data points to give the illusion of a different release pattern than it actually had.  The graph was supposed to convey a marketing meaning they couldn't "claim" outright.  That was killed off later down the road by going from a linear to log graph making full use of the margin of error to get rid the infamous graph as the marketing push had changed a little and people we starting to make comments on the internet about the faked up graph.

I have had prescribed dozens of medications through the years that might cause increased breast size in men and have NEVER ever been warned of such by any doc.  How about you?  I haven't been warned of most other side effects either unless it was a call the doc or go to ER immediately type or the don't lie down for an hour or you will regret it.  When do the Standards of Care require notification of occasional non-dangerous side effects.  I have no idea at all on that except that I have never been so warned for most.  When I had my gall bladder out the surgeon did a lousy job of lining up my belly button in its original alignment when he put it back together.  He hadn't warned me of that possibility either. 

[TigerPaws]

Alchemist,

$5.00 dollar aspirin? Today it is above $15.00 dollars each.

I was told that there would be side effects for the treatment of my enlarged prostate and that these "side effects" would be permeate. The exact extent of these side effects was unknown and varied greatly from man to man. The alternative was to do little or nothing and run a very high fish of prostate cancer. So my choices were to accept the consequences of a treatment which would leave me sterile (at my age I was no longer going to father another child anyway) and take on secondary female characteristics of which the most notable would be growing breasts (how large would be determined by genetics).

My choices were simple, try several lesser treatments and hope my condition would improve or go for the treatment with the highest possible success rate and accept the consequences of that decision. I chose the treatment with the highest success rate and while my prostate is back to normal I grew a 38C rack, which was a fair trade considering that the alternative would be to eventually have my prostate removed and wear a diaper for the rest of my life. A fair trade in my humble opinion.

But I digress, society in general has put physicians on a pedestal and the medical industry has helped foster that through years of targeted propaganda. A doctor is no different than a plumber, engineer or chemist the only difference is society believes they are different and all too many physicians foster and enjoy that feeling of being the all knowing, all powerful Oz.

Hells bells, I have 4 Bachelor Degrees, 2 Masters and 2 Ph.D's and make one hell of a lot more than any doctor, yet I do not foster the belief that I am god like as far too many physicians do.

The medical industry is rife with fraud because society allows it, "if" the CEO, board of directors and any senior staff were found of wrong doing they should be personally prosecuted and put in prison, Instead these corporations as fined which to them is a cost of doing business. As an example, remember the Vioxx mess 10 or so years ago? Some 6,000 people died and no one went to prison for manslaughter, if the top executives of Merck & Co. had been charged with mass murder and crimes against humanity then there would be real change but no one went to prison and Merck simply paid out money while the murders went free.

Hospitals, clinics and doctors charge outrageous sums because society allows them to do so. As an example one of my associates had a heart valve replaced, in the US this procedure would have cost upwards of $250,000 dollars or more, yet at a private hospital in Germany the procedure was the equivalent of 6,000 dollars. Why such a huge cost difference when the procedure was the same, the care was excellent and the results indisputable?

The American people have allowed their health care system to become bloated corrupt.
 

[Alchemist]

Hi Tigerpaws,

I guess the $5 asprin dates me a little.  That was what they started out at the beginning of my career.  At that same time medical insurance costs were spoken of in terms of percentage of salary, ie 10%.  Now they talk of percent of GDP of 19+%.  At that time we estimated that the medical insurance system as it existed would become unsustainable when premium approached 20% of salary, which is where it is now past and the system is disintegrating.  Insurance cost of $12K/yr for somebody making $36,000 is impossible.  We had also linked in fossil fuel inflation in our economic predictions and and projected that such costs would also increase at 2-4x inflation, just as medical costs did, and compete for the shrinking dollar speeding up the self destruction of our medical and economic system.   

President Clinton is not remembered for the biggest thing he did, put off the economic collapse from the mid 90's until 2008 by making a few changes.  I had designed a model of the economic collapse with trillions of debt and I called the model "Black Hole".

My fellow consultants and I all put our fingers in the dike holding back the flood.  we worked for plan trustees in the interests of the plan members, going after bad docs and bad insurers equally.

My academic career didn't turn out the way I expected.  I had to drop out of college 4 times in 4 years for health reasons.  It was a continuation of the previous 12 years in which I missed 1/3 the school year each year.  All of this because of the pseudo vitamins folic acid and cyanocobalamin, an inactive folate and inactive cobalamin (lab mistake that got the Nobel prize)that my body finds unusable and destroyed my health.  I've been recovering from that the past 9 years now and with the advent of Metafolin (REAL METHYLFOLATE) a few years ago have finally come out of a life long vitamin deficiency about 5 months ago.

I'm plenty pissed off at the medical research establishment for destroying my life by protecting bad research.  There are millions and millions sick and even dying from these same man made vitamin deficiencies right now and it isn't recognized.  Hell, it's even protected and a treaty (Codex Alimentarus, written by the chemicasl industry) would get rid of all the "natural" vitamins and make them prescription only thereby insuring that nobody will self discover the real effects of the real vitamins and be able to recover.  Instead the populations taking these pseudo vitamins are maintained in a marginal state of perpetual ill health with multitudes of neuromuscular and metabolic problems.  The lack of real b12 and real folate causes hundreds of symptoms and biochemical changes that are like chasing fairies as they are results, not causes.

The tie in is that lack of these b12 and folate vitamins causes all sorts of growth and biochemical abnormalities.  These lacks completely screws up hormones.  They might be a cause of gyne.  At 39 my  testosterone dropped through the floor and it wasn't until 12 years later that I was prescribed testosterone.  Suddenly sexual functioning returned, energy, mood, feeling at least half decent, but not until after correcting the pseudo cyanocbl to methylb12 and having functioning b12 in my body for a change.

However, the docs prescribing testosterone didn't warn me of possible enlarged breasts but then they were looking at my DDs when it was prescribed.  It was way too late to make any difference anyway.

I've never had to have any prostate treatment and so would not have been warned for that specific treatment.  However, when one checks out which meds can cause enlarged breasts we see some diuretics (yup, got those), thyroid hormone (have that), morphine (have that), testosterone (have that), benzos (had those), Dilantin (had that) etc.  Seems like every med I get prescribed through the years had that side effect as a possibility but nobody ever said anything about those or most other side effects

The Vioxx situation is only a tiny tip of the iceberg.  It is all too characteristic of how intellectually corrupt the research and marketing of drugs, and other medical treatments has become.

Basically I have worked in a business that hasn't let me buy it's product, medical insurance, for decades.   As I worked with software and data, I didn't make the rules, only enforced them and tried to reform the industry from the inside.

[TigerPaws]

Alchemist,

Unfortunately working from the inside rarely has any real effect and to day being a "Whistle Blower" is just as effective; meaning no change will come of it. Big Pharma and the medical establishment is in control of the very government regulators that oversee them. Much like the "Military Industrial Complex" revolving door the system breeds corruption.

Nothing substantial will change until the public demands that the people in charge of these corporations and those directly responsible be held criminally liable in perpetuity for their actions, and that goes for the physicians as well. If a physician is found during a criminal (not civil) investigation of negligence or incompetence they need to be prosecuted and sent to prison. When people are faced with the very real knowledge that as a result of their misdeeds, actions, lies or other wrongdoing that they will go to prison, then we will see real substantive change.

Until then we are on our own to learn, question and know as much as the "medical" professionals; blind trust is no longer an option and could get you killed.