[과학]Over 100 people choose the wrong way to treat hair loss…”Manufacturers cover up side effects”

Merck, an American pharmaceutical company, found a case where Propecia, a male hair loss treatment drug manufactured by its company, caused depression and extreme choice, but it turned out to be deliberately concealed. Propecia is the world’s first hair loss drug approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1997.

On the 3rd, Reuters news agency in the United States obtained and reported data on the Propecia side effect lawsuit filed in the Brooklyn Federal Court in New York. According to the data, Merck has obtained more than 200 cases of severe depression after taking Propecia since at least 2009. However, Merck insisted on the FDA that it was unreliable because there were few and less specific side effects.

In particular, Merck convinced the FDA not to add an extreme option to the warning text regarding the side effects of Propecia. The FDA accepted Merck’s claim and did not put a warning about extreme choices on the label.

However, more than 700 cases of severe depression have been reported among people taking Propecia in the United States since. At least 100 of them are known to have died from extreme choices, and US consumer protection groups are criticizing Merck and the FDA for hiding side effects for sales.

According to health data company Ecuvia, in 2020, more than 2.4 million people were prescribed Propecia in the U.S. alone, more than twice the number in 2015. Some US medical experts have raised the question that “Merck and the FDA are potentially threatening consumers’ lives with Propecia.”

However, Merck made an official statement regarding the report and maintained its previous claim that “there is no scientific evidence of the correlation between Propecia and depression, so there is no reason to insert a cautionary phrase.”

Meanwhile, Korea’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety inserted a warning phrase in Propecia in 2017 to beware of depression and extreme options. This is in accordance with the report by MSD Korea, a drug developer.

YTN PLUS Reporter Jeong Yoon-joo
([email protected])

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