My views on the Framingham study are very optimistic as they are the best scientific data we have to evaluate the incidence of valvular disease to relate with trying to correlate an increased incidence in diet drug users, But I am also optimistic based on the FDA findings as these are highly suspicious, only made more so by the WSJ survey which highly contradicted the FDA findings. The FDA findings are most suspicious and "tossable", as the data doesn't jive between the five centers who contributed to the study.........specifically that although one center specifically picked many of their patients to study from patients with noted heart murmurs and therefore one would expect a higher degree of abnormal echo findings (and this center sent in the most patients of all five, 121 out of the 291) in this center's data......this is not so, in fact this center was even slightly below the average.
I do not feel the diet drug recall was wrong, but I feel the truth of the matter, other than the fact that an ECG is a fairly subjective test, will not be found in the FDA data.
I feel when more scientific information is obtained, the diet drugs will show themselves to create a very significantly smaller potentiator in valvular disease, and that this potentiation will be time related (ie the longer on the drugs, the higher chance) which will add significantly more fingerpointing towards fen-phen which has been in use much longer. And with anectodal evidence pointing towards a reversal of the condition in many cases when the drugs are stopped, this is only further findings I would suspect to be emerging ( not necessarily soon) that will help.
And in consideration of the Dow Corning release you posted, this simply shows how long this legal process can take ( and will take if continued), so when and if the suits will directly create a strain to the revenues other than from the recall, we will be sitting pretty |
