Study Suggests Celebrex Isn’t Riskier Than Rival Pain Drugs

However, do not celebrate yet because a clinic trial done by Merck in attempts to find whether Vioxx could prevent colon cancer made an interesting revelation. The drug was found to have increasing heart attack cases, triggering the company to cancel its production in 2004. Since then, analysts have been asking whether Celebrex also can cause Celebrex.

Celebrex Safer than most alternatives

Almost 10 years ago, Food and Drug Administration sought out to get answers from Pfizer. We’ve lingered in the dark for quite some time now but finally there seems a light at the end of the tunnel. A clinical study was done and most researchers thought that Celebrex would turn out to be more risky than its counterpart. However, they were perplexed to learn that it was no worse and in any case was safer than most alternatives.

At the time of designing the study, many considered the available small studies to conclude that naproxen was safest and that celecoxib would be found to be far much riskier. Susan Ellenberg, a biostatistician at the University of Pennsylvania, said that some F.D.A already wanted to term naproxen as the safest. But that did not happen after a 2015 meeting by an advisory committee which said it was best to wait for the final results before making a conclusion.

According to Dr. Milton Pressler, a cardiologist in charge of clinical affairs for Pfizer Essential Health, close to two million Americans does use Celebrex or generic celecoxib. One can only access the drug after prescription.

How the study was done

This done was done on 24,000 participants suffering from arthritis and stood high chances of getting a heart disease or already had it. A third of the participants were assigned ibuprofen, a third naproxen and a third Celebrex. Each person was given an equal dosage and no one, including the researchers, was aware of what individuals were taking.

The study findings were then published on the New England Journal of Medicine, coinciding with Dr. Steven Nissen’s annual meeting of the American Heart Association. He is from the Cleveland Clinic and is credited for having directed the study.

While explain the study results, he said that only patients on daily medication for months or years were affected by these results. These patients are the ones who already have a heart disease or stand a high risk of infection. They are not applicable to occasional ibuprofen users for pulled muscles or those who take naproxen for headache.

The advisory committee did not shy away from warning that none of these drugs was actually risk-free. On the other hand, the F.D.A said that it would not comment on the study findings.

Dr. Michael Joseph Blaha, director of clinical research for the Johns Hopkins Ciccarone Center for the Prevention of Heart Disease, said that “This is a common question that people have: Is it safe to take these drugs?”

This study aimed at taking a look into how safe celecoxib was when compared to the other two drugs.