Canadian Yaz Study
The Food and Drug Administration recently released a study confirming what the British Medical Journal had already suggested in April. The FDA study found that birth control pills containing an ingredient called drospirenone put women at a greater risk of blood clotting than from other types of birth control pills.
The Canadian Medical Association Journal came to the same conclusion, stating that the risk for women taking pills with drospirenone is about 3 or 4 in 1,000. To put it in perspective, the risk from other pills is 1 in 1,000.
If there were only 1,000 women taking these pills, then 3 or 4 blood clotting episodes would be bad enough. But the pills that the BMJ, the CMAJ and the FDA are referring to are Yaz and Yasmin, which are birth control pills made by Bayer. Significantly more than 1,000 women are taking these pills. Hundreds of thousands of women all over the world are taking them, so the threat to the health of these women is much more wide spread.
It should also be mentioned that Bayer engaged in a particularly heavy advertising campaign which made quite a few misleading promises. The advertisements claimed that Yaz could prevent women from gaining weight, could cure acne and could prevent PMS. This wasn’t true. Some people who took the pill did not gain weight, but there isn’t much evidence that suggests that all women would experience the same thing. And some women did experience a clearing up of some pimples. But in the advertisements, they listed symptoms that are commonly associated with PMS, while what Yaz and Yasmin actually had an effect on were symptoms of Pre-Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder. PMDD is significantly different from PMS, and the ads implied that the two conditions were interchangeable.
These exaggerated claims caused Yaz and Yasmin to become one of the best selling birth control pills in the country, which led to more women unknowingly placing themselves in danger.
Normally when you think of blood clots (if you happen to think about them at all,) you would think of them as positive things. They are part of a naturally occurring mechanism that keeps us from bleeding to death. If you cut yourself, the blood in the area of the cut begins to thicken, making it easier for the flow of blood out of the body to stop. But the problem with drospirenone is that it is apparently creating blood clots where there is no reason for them. These clots generally form in the deep veins of the legs, which causes pain and swelling (deep vein thrombosis.) The real danger happens when these clots break into pieces, because then they are small enough to travel through the bloodstream. They can cause blockages in blood flow to the heart, which is what causes heart attacks, and they can cause blockages in blood flow to the brain, which is what causes strokes. They can also cause pulmonary embolisms, which are blockages in blood to the lungs.
Blood clotting has always been a concern with birth control pills, but the numbers weren’t that high. Our main concern is that Bayer put out a drug that elevates the risk of clotting, and engaged in misleading advertising in order to market it. The sheer number of women taking these pills makes Yaz and Yasmin a very real health risk.
Greenberg and Bederman are currently representing women in the Washington, D.C. area who were taking Yaz, Yasmin or Ocella, which is the generic version of the drug, and were injured or hospitalized as a result. Many of these health problems have effects that can last your whole life, and if the cause of the problems was a prescription drug that you took in good faith, then you shouldn’t have to bear the costs of your injury. If you live in Virginia, Maryland or Washington D.C. and you have been hurt due to Yaz, Yasmin or Ocella, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation today.
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