Healthy Skepticism Library item: 12847

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Keilthy P.
‘Superdrug’ advice is changed after tragic death
Camden New Journal 2008 Feb 14
http://www.thecnj.co.uk/camden/2008/021408/news021408_09.html

Full text:

GOVERNMENT guidelines on the safety of “superdrugs” taken by three millions Britons have been changed after an investigation into the death of a Hampstead private schoolmaster.
Statins – cholesterol-lowering drugs prescribed to those at risk of heart disease – will carry new leaflets warning of side-effects like those blamed in an inquest into the death of University College School housemaster Dr Allan Woolley, 52, last April.
Dr Woolley was killed by a train at North Wembley station, holding a despairing note which read: “Just burn my wretched body without ceremony.”
But after friends and family asked an inquest to examine the role played by statins in his death, the coroner’s jury rejected a suicide verdict and instead recorded that he suffered “psychic disturbances, a known side-effect of the drug simvastatin”.
Within weeks of being prescribed simvastatins for his higher than average cholesterol, diabetic Dr Woolley, a hugely popular and active chemistry teacher at the school for 27 years, suffered sleep loss, hallucinations, and blackouts.
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which monitors drug safety, issued a new drug safety update last Thursday.
Yesterday (Wednesday), a spokeswoman for MHRA said that she could not confirm that Dr Woolley’s death had led to the change. However, the MHRAs details of adverse drug reaction figures show only one recent instance of psychic disturbances leading to death. Since that is known to be Dr Woolley, “it would be reasonable to come to that conclusion,” she said.