Healthy Skepticism Library item: 9291

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

Goldstein J.
A Measure of Vindication for Wyeth
Wall Street Journal Health Blog 2007 Apr 4
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2007/04/04/a-measure-of-vindication-for-wyeth/

Full text:

All along, drug maker Wyeth has been the Big Pharma face of hormone replacement therapy. The company’s drug Prempro, a combination of estrogen and progestin, was used in one arm of the large study known as WHI that was halted because the drug increased the risk of heart attacks. The findings, published in 2002, rang a loud alarm over use of the drugs to ease the symptoms of menopause.

The WHI report crushed what had been the cornerstone of Wyeth’s pharmaceutical franchise. Even with a recent rebound, sales of Premarin, an estrogen-only pill, and Prempro are a far cry from their peak before the first results of the WHI study came out. In 2001, sales of the drugs topped $2.07 billion. By 2003, sales had fallen to $1.28 billion and declined in later years to less than $1 billion annually.

Still, Wyeth stood by the medicines. And demand has begun to creep up. World-wide sales of Premarin and Prempro medicines were $1.05 billion last year, a 16% increase from $909 million in 2005. Sales of Prempro alone were $239 million in 2006, down 1% from $242 million the year before.

Today, Wyeth said in a statement that the results should be reassuring about heart-attack risks for newly menopausal women.

So what does the new finding that HRT does not appear to raise the risk of heart disease for women in their 50s mean for the company? We asked Tara Parker-Pope, the Journal’s HRT maven, and author of the recently published book The Hormone Decision.

Here’s what she told us:

What’s tricky here for Wyeth is that even if the pendulum is starting to swing back in favor of hormones, there remains a bit of a backlash against Premarin and Prempro. Both are made from horse urine, and a lot of women just don’t want that. And Suzanne Somers’ crusade in favor of bioidentical hormones, custom-mixed hormones made from plants, has really had an effect on women’s thinking.

In general, this latest finding is good news for Wyeth. It may be that finally the company doesn’t have to hide from the Women’s Health Initiative anymore – it can proudly declare that its products are the most-studied hormone drugs in history and now the government is saying that for most women who use them they are safe. After all, this latest data showed that 50 to 59 year old women had a 30% lower risk of dying if they used Premarin or Prempro – and that finding was statistically significant. Wyeth has stayed the course amidst all its hormone troubles, but now I think the question is whether they can leverage this into better sales.

The biggest stumbling block may be the breast cancer issue. Most of the litigation over Prempro doesn’t have to do with heart health, but instead relates to breast cancer. That’s a harder battle to fight, because the data do show a link between combination hormone use and a slightly higher risk for breast cancer.