Glaxo Settles Nearly 200 Paxil Birth Defect Lawsuits

For the second time this year, GlaxoSmithKline is moving to dispense with nagging litigation by agreeing to wholesale settlements. Last month, the drugmaker agreed to pay about $60 million to settle 700 lawsuits alleging its Avandia diabetes pill causes heart attacks and strokes (back story). Now, Glaxo is settling nearly 200 lawsuits that charged its Paxil antidepressant caused birth defects, although the amounts were not disclosed, The Legal Intelligencer reports.

The move comes after a Pennsylvania state court jury last October awarded a woman $2.5 million in damages for failing to properly warn docs and pregnant women about the risks of the antidepressant. This case, which was filed by the family of three-year-old Lyam Kilker, who was born with heart defects his mother blamed on the drug. It was the first of 600 such lawsuits and was seen as a test of Glaxo's vulnerability (background). Since then, Glaxo settled several other suits headed for a jury, although about 100 more remain pending (here is the order for the settlement).

Kilker has three congenital heart defects, including a rare defect known as an interrupted aortic arch. Glaxo argued this particular defect has not been associated with the use of Paxil by pregnant mothers and its cause is generally unknown. Plaintiffs' attorney Jamie Sheller says GSK thought it could win on Kilker's more rare defect, which is why they took that lawsuit to trial and settled other cases.

A Glaxo spokeswoman writes us to say that the drugmaker "believes it acted properly and responsibly in conducting its clinical trial program for Paxil, in marketing the medicine, in monitoring its safety once it was approved for use and in updating pregnancy information in the medicine’s label as new information became available." She notes that other lawsuits are scheduled for trial in the fall.

2 Comments

Nov 3, 2012 - 9:17am
So I keep reading about the effects of Paxil while pregnant. I have my own personal experience with this. In 1997 I gave birth to one child but In my third month of pregnancy, I had heavy bleeding and in the end I was diagnosed with an 8cm hematoma....a possible twin to my son,Dakota. He has ADD and is my "Murphy's Law" child. After multiple ear infections, he had an adenoidectomy at the age of 18 months.He has high blood pressure, ADD, asthma, was hospitalized for a week with a kidney infection at age 9 and that was after THREE broken wrists in less than 10 months. Yet? The Drs all say this is not abnormal? and can't find any one thing to point to what started all this? and we still have no underlying cause for the high blood pressure. :/ Seeing and hearing things like this make me wonder....did the Paxil cause it?
Nov 4, 2012 - 8:55am
I blame doctors here as well as Glaxo. Perhaps if no better than by fear alone we as a health care industry, through effective PR, had pretty well convinced the public that taking prescription drugs during pregnancy was a very bad idea, even though we had limited information on many of them. We drilled this into doctors, and they in turn drilled it into their patients. As a result of this campaign drug use during pregnancy dropped to record low levels during the 1980's and 1990's.

The monster has returned. Doctors will do what it takes to keep patients even if it means scripting a pregnant woman during the first trimester. It's hard to believe that a generation of pregnant woman from only 20 years ago that was scared of using scripted drugs has been replaced by the current generation of doctors and patients.

This also goes along with the fact that overall in the United States the quality of prenatal care has dropped along with managed care and the rising number of uninsureds. This article shows the hugely increasing numbers of pregnant women who have ignored the sound advice of the recent generations and have received prescription drugs from their doctors, sadly with the results we are now seeing.

http://www.aboutlawsuits.com/pregnancy-drug-use-report-18502/