Damage From a Diet Drug Cocktail
Suggested lead: People who took the diet drug combination called "fen-phen" have new hope that their heart damage might eventually improve. Tom Britt has more.
Before it was pulled off the market in 1997, between six and 10 million people are estimated to have taken the combination of fenfluramine and phentermine in an effort to lose weight. The drug cocktail, popularly known as "fen-phen," was pulled when it was discovered that many patients had developed heart valve leakage, known as "regurgitation." Now, two new studies are giving hope that the damage might actually reverse in some patients as time goes by. Duke University Medical Center cardiology fellow Dr. Steven Mast was a researcher on one of those studies.
"The results suggest that at one to two years follow-up, the regurgitation in the vast majority of patients either remains stable or improved, with only about five percent experiencing worsening in the degree of regurgitation."
Mast says phentermine does not appear to cause any problems on its own, and fenfluramine is no longer available in the U.S.
"I don't think that fenfluramine or fen-phen will ever be used again, at least not in this country."
I'm Tom Britt.
Mast says it is reassuring that most patients with heart valve regurgitation stabilized or even improved.
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"That enthusiasm needs to be tempered a little bit because most of those patients are young and may be left with mild or moderate degrees of valvular regurgitation, and no one really understands what is going to happen over the next 20 to 30 years of their life expectancy."