History of Diet Pills – Weighing Over Diet Pills 2

The idea of losing weight using pills has been going on since the late 1800s. It was in 1893 when the first diet pill was made available. This diet pill was actually a thyroid extract that was sold under names like “Frank J. Kellogg’s Safe Fat Reducer.” There were patients that had lost weight when they took this pill. Consequently, when people who do not have hypothyroid condition began taking this pill, they discovered that this drug has severe side effects. Since hypothyroidism is hormonal condition that was “characterized by an impaired rate of metabolism”, people who do possess this condition and took this drug extract experienced “chest pains, an increased heart rate, and higher blood pressure”. Some even died when they took this drug (Swain, 2003).

Not so long ago, in 1997, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has required warning labels for popular diet pills because of health risks associated with the drugs. Fen/phen was a widely used appetite suppressant that consisted of a combination of the drugs fenfluramine and phentermine. Twenty four people, who were taking combinations of the drugs fenfluramine and phentermine, developed a rare but serious heart-valve condition (Connolly et al., 1997). The drugs also were also found to increase users’ chances of developing pulmonary hypertension, a deadly disorder that constricts the arteries that carry blood to the lungs. Both fenfluramine and a related drug, dexfenfluramine, were also found to cause brain damage in laboratory animals (Evans and Roberts, 1998).

Redux was the drug in question because FDA approved prior to the discovery of its after-effects. After sixteen and a half months, the FDA announced that it had asked the manufacturers of both fenfluramine and Redux to remove their drugs from the market and that they had agreed. The FDA also recommended that anyone still using fenfluramine or Redux should quit. It made no move against phentermine because there was no evidence that phentermine by itself had caused any damage. Since then, the case against fenfluramine and Redux has grown stronger. A trio of studies published in The New England Journal of Medicine almost exactly a year after the FDA’s action found a clear connection between the drugs and valve damage. The most alarming of these reported the results of echocardiograms on nearly 500 subjects, both those who had been taking appetite-control drugs and a control group who had not. It found heart-valve problems in only 1.3 percent of the subjects who had never taken appetite suppressants, but in 12.7 percent of those who had used Redux, 24.5 percent of those who used Redux in combination with phentermine, and 26.3 percent of those who had taken fenphen. In other words, someone who had taken fen-phen or dexfen-phen had one chance in four of damaged heart valves. Redux alone looked safer, but the researchers noted that this might have been because the Redux users had taken the drug for a shorter time than the other two groups. A second study looked at patients who had taken Redux for only two and a half months. They, too, had more heart valve problems than a control group who had not used the drug, but the difference was much smaller, again perhaps because they had taken the drug for so short a time. The third study examined how many users of appetite suppressants had been diagnosed by their doctors with valve problems. Among the more than 18,000 patient records they studied, they found only a handful of cases of valve disorders, but all of them appeared in users of appetite suppressants (Pool, 2001, p. 187).

As of this time, the FDA had only approved Xenical as the veritable fat-reducing pill available in the market today. Xenical was first FDA-approved to be sold with prescription in 1999. Then, FDA advisory panel January 2006 voted, 11-3, to recommend that the agency approve the over-the-counter (OTC) sale of the weight-loss drug orlistat, sold under the brand name Xenical. The British pharmaceutical firm GlaxoSmithKline PLC had applied for approval for the OTC sale of the drug in 60-milligram doses, compared with the prescription dosage of 120 milligrams. As it was approved, Xenical became the first weight-loss drug approved for OTC sale to the public. However, FDA’s Web site cautioned that the 60-milligram orlistat dose offered questionable benefits to consumers. One FDA reviewer wrote that “there is no evidence presented that the modest, transient weight loss due to orlistat will afford any long-term clinical benefit through either a change in behavior or a reduced risk of clinical diseases manifested by being overweight.” The review also warned that the drug’s label did not warn clearly enough of the risks the drug posed to some people who should not take it because of health reasons such as organ transplants and diabetes (Saul, 21 January 2006).