CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: Lyrica is an important product for Pfizer. In two thousand ten, the drug produced three billion dollars in sales worldwide.
Doctor Cawkwell says Pfizer is studying patients with fibromyalgia in China and Japan. And she says the company is looking at what she calls “bio-markers” in people with fibromyalgia. Bio-markers help researchers know what is happening in the bodies of people with a disease or medical condition. Doctor Cawkwell says it is important to find bio-markers for fibromyalgia.
DOCTOR GAIL CAWKWELL: “One of the really frustrating things for patients with fibromyalgia is that there’s nothing to measure in labs or in X-rays. And sometimes people think if you can’t measure something then maybe it’s not real. So we are looking at bio-markers, we’re doing sophisticated X-rays, like functional MRI and spec-scanning to understand what happens in the brains of patients with fibromyalgia when they have pain, what happens to their brains when we treat that pain.”
CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: Doctor Cawkwell says people are rarely hospitalized because of fibromyalgia, and most patients do not die from it. She says this is why it can be difficult to know how many people suffer from the disease.
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FAITH LAPIDUS: Researcher Brian Walitt believes that all of the advertising for Lyrica may be bad for people with fibromyalgia. Doctor Walitt is the director of the Fibromyalgia Research Center at Georgetown Hospital Center in Washington, DC. He is studying sixty-seven patients with the disease. He is critical of doctors who look to drugs first to help their fibromyalgia patients.
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2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25