Trasylol Pulled From Worldwide Market

In a company statement on its Web site Monday, Bayer stressed that the suspension was temporary. "Bayer believes that the totality of the available data continue to support a favorable risk-benefit profile for Trasylol when used according to labeling," the statement said.

Heart experts said, however, that the drug's suspension came as no surprise.

"This is not really new news. It has been surfacing in the past year and a half," said Dr. W. Douglas Weaver, president-elect of the American College of Cardiology and co-director of the Heart & Vascular Institute at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. "Many surgeons have stopped using the drug. This won't have a huge impact, but surgeons want to know [the danger]."

text continues below

The FDA plans to do a detailed review of the preliminary results from the Canadian trial before deciding whether to allow Trasylol, which it first approved in 1993, back on the U.S. market.

In the Canadian trial, called BART, an elevated 30-day and overall death risk caused the study's Data Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) to recommend stopping patient enrollment. The trial had been set to recruit about 3,000 adults who were candidates for a variety of cardiac surgeries and were at high risk of bleeding.

A month before, on Sept. 12, an FDA advisory panel had recommended that Trasylol remain on the market, despite mounting evidence that it might have serious side effects.

In addition, in February, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found patients on the drug were at greater risk of dying over the next five years than those given two other medications. The same researchers had linked the drug to an increased risk of kidney failure, heart failure and stroke in a study published in 2006.

"Our present findings deal with death," one of the JAMA study's authors, Dr. Dennis T. Mangano, said at the time. Mangano, director of the Ischemia Research and Education Foundation, a California-based nonprofit group, said that "the death rate for aprotinin patients far outstrips that for the other two drugs."