Plaintiff wins cancer suit against drug firms
Posted on Tuesday, February 26, 2008
A federal jury delivered a $ 2. 75 million verdict Monday against pharmaceutical companies Wyeth and Pharmacia & Upjohn, now a division of Pfizer Inc., after finding that a Little Rock woman’s breast cancer was caused by taking a combination of estrogen and progestin drugs made by the companies to treat her menopausal symptoms.
U. S. District Judge Bill Wilson Jr., who presided over the trial that began Feb. 4 in his Little Rock courtroom, ordered the jury to return next Monday to begin the trial’s second phase, in which plaintiff Donna Scroggin, 66, will seek punitive damages.
A gag order that Wilson imposed on all parties prevented Scroggin or attorneys on either side from commenting after the verdict, which was delivered early Monday afternoon. The seven-man, five-woman jury spent an entire day deliberating on Friday and then adjourned for the weekend, resuming again at 9 a.m. Monday for another half-day.
The compensatory-damages award represented the opposite outcome of two previous trials in Wilson’s courtroom against Wyeth.
The first of those trials, which was also the first hormone-therapy lawsuit in the country to go to trial, resulted in a finding for Wyeth in September 2006. In that case, a jury that dwindled down to 10 people — eight women and two men — rejected claims of plaintiff Linda Reeves, then 67, of Benton that more than eight years of taking the company’s estrogen and progestin drugs to ease menopausal symptoms and prevent osteoporosis caused her to develop breast cancer, for which she underwent a mastectomy.
A second jury trial held in Little Rock ended on Feb. 15, 2007, with a jury of nine women and three men finding in favor of Wyeth and against Helene Rush, then 72, of Little Rock. Rush began taking the hormone combination at age 55, also to ease menopausal symptoms, and was diagnosed with breast cancer 10 years later, causing her to have a lump removed from her right breast.
Scroggin was 59 when she was first diagnosed with breast cancer. She had been on hormone therapy for 11 years, starting with Upjohn’s Provera, a progestin drug, in combination with Wyeth’s Premarin, an estrogen-only drug, and later switching to Wyeth’s combination estrogen-progestin pill, Prempro. She underwent a double mastectomy.
Upjohn merged in 1995 with Pharmacia, becoming known as Pharmacia & Upjohn Co. In 2003, the merged company became a division of Pfizer Inc.
Wyeth spokesman Doug Petkus said Monday from his New Jersey office, “We are unable to provide comment at this time because the proceedings have not yet reached a conclusion.” Pf izer spokesman Chris Loder said from the company’s New York City offices, “A court order prevents any of the parties, including Pfizer’s Upjohn unit, from commenting on the Scroggin verdict.” Petkus said Monday that six cases against Wyeth that have gone to trial in various parts of the country, excluding the Scroggin case.
While the two previous federal juries in Little Rock found for Wyeth, three state-court juries in Philadelphia found for the plaintiff and another state-court jury in Reno, Nev., found for the three joint plaintiffs.
However, two of the Philadelphia jury awards were thrown out by judges, and a new trial was ordered in the third Philadelphia case. The plaintiffs are appealing that order.
Then just last week, a judge reduced the plaintiff’s verdict in Reno from $ 134. 5 million to $ 57. 6 million. The company had asked the judge to reduce the award for three Nevada women to less than $ 10 million.
Thousands of cases are still pending in federal and state courts across the country, including additional cases to be tried in Little Rock.
In Scroggin’s trial, Wyeth attorneys argued that she had a strong history of breast cancer on both sides of her family, with seven breast cancers found in five women in three consecutive generations, which made it all but certain that she would have developed breast cancer whether she took the hormone drugs or not.
Scroggin’s attorney, James Morris of Austin, Texas, disputed that assertion, saying that the type of cancer that Scroggin had wasn’t genetic in nature. He noted that her cancer cells were hormone-receptor positive, meaning that the infusion of hormones on top of otherwise-dormant cancer cells is what caused the cancer to sprout and invade surrounding tissue.
A link between the hormone combination and breast cancer was discovered in July 2002, when a large government study known as the Women’s Health Initiative was stopped abruptly after 4 1 / 2 years when researchers noticed a 24 percent higher incidence of invasive breast cancer among women who took the hormones.
Until 1996, when the two hormones were combined in one pill, Prempro, some menopausal women used the estrogen drug, Premarin, in conjunction with Provera, which supplied progestin, to relieve symptoms such as hot flashes and night sweats. Doctors had years earlier begun prescribing progestin along with estrogen after the use of estrogen alone had been linked to endometrial cancer. Studies showed that the incidence of endometrial cancer, or cancer in the lining of the uterus, was greatly reduced with the addition of progestin.
According to Bloomberg News, Scroggin’s claims are only the second to go to trial against Upjohn. Bloomberg reported that in the first case, in Philadelphia, the jury found for the plaintiff and awarded $ 1. 5 million, but a judge later threw out that award as well.
The drugs all remain on the market with FDA approval, although doctors now sometimes prescribe them in smaller doses and for a shorter time.
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online
