How does a painkiller harm the heart?
It was Garret FitzGerald, the chair of pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania, who first proposed that the painkiller Vioxx and its cousins might cause heart attacks by tipping a crucial hormonal balance. So neither of two attention-grabbing data sets published this month has come as a great surprise to him, despite the implications the data are likely to have for the 11,500 lawsuits from former patients that dog the drug’s manufacturer, Merck. To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).
