HRT Drugs Based on Medical Fraud

Court documents unsealed as part of a lawsuit against drug giant Pfizer reveal how drug companies used deception and fear to manipulate women into taking dangerous hormone replacement therapy (HRT) drugs.

"The information coming out in litigation helps us understand how a belief in a 'protective benefit' of estrogens on the heart was able to spread like wildfire through the medical community," said Jerome L. Avorn of Harvard Medical School.

Pfizer, which purchased Wyeth in October 2009, is being sued by more than 13,000 people who claim that they developed cancer and other health problems after taking HRT drugs. The plaintiffs claim that Wyeth knew of these risks all along, and downplayed them even as it exaggerated the drugs' benefits.'

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Pfizer Hid Evidence That HRT Causes Cancer

A Philadelphia jury has found drug giant Pfizer Inc. guilty of deliberately ignoring evidence that hormone replacement therapy (HRT) drug Prempro increased women's risk of breast cancer, ordering it to pay unspecified damages to defendant Connie Barton.

Millions of women used Prempro and other HRT drugs up until 2002, when the groundbreaking Women's Health Initiative study found that taking the drugs significantly increased women's risk of breast cancer and death from cardiovascular disease. The risk was so striking that researchers called an early halt to the study out of concern for participants' lives. The drugs were -- and still are -- marketed to relieve the symptoms of menopause, such as hot flashes, mood swings and night sweats.

More recent research suggests that HRT drugs also increase women's risk of dying from lung cancer.'

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