A 2012 study could have an impact on legal action over a group of antibiotics known as quinolones..

Quinolones are a class of antibiotic drugs that interfere with bacteria and can help cure infections. This family of drugs includes Cipro, Levaquin, and Avelox. Quinolones are a largely artificial family of antibiotics and unlike previous generations of antibiotics, they are not based on compounds produced by bacteria or fungi.

Quinolone antibiotics work by targeting the way bacteria unwind their DNA when doubling. Since bacteria use a slightly different class of enzymes to do this, quinolone antibiotics can target bacteria without damaging human cells. These drugs are very effective against a wide range of bacterial infections. However, it has been alleged that these drugs may sometimes cause serious side effects.

In 2012, researchers published an article about quinolones in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ), a peer-reviewed medical journal. In this article, researchers used a nested case-control study to test the idea that quinolones can cause liver injuries.

In this type of study, doctors identify patients with a characteristic they want to study, often a disease, and compare them to similar patients who do not have the disease. It is a useful methodology because researchers can design an effective study using general data collected by health care systems.

In this case, researchers compared a group of 144 patients who developed acute liver failure with no history of liver problems and compared them to data from patients with very similar backgrounds.

The researchers found that patients who had acute liver failure with no history of liver problems were more likely to have used some quinolone antibiotics like Levaquin. Disturbingly, researchers also discovered that nearly two-thirds of patients who arrived at hospitals with acute liver failure died from it.

In the biological sciences, researchers use statistical analysis to determine the odds that their results are the result of coincidence. It was determined that there was less than a 5 percent chance that these results were merely the result of random chance, strongly suggesting a link between quinolone antibiotics and the risk of acute liver failure.

Quinolone lawsuits have been filed by people affected by liver damage after using floroquinolone/quinolone antibiotics such as Cipro or Levaquin. These Cipro lawsuits allege that drug makers were aware — or reasonably should have been aware — of the risk of serious liver problems allegedly associated with these drugs.

Such a quinolone lawsuit could further allege that drug makers did not do enough to protect the public from life-threatening live damage. Drug lawsuits like this typically seek to recoup costs related to dangerous drug reactions like medical bills, lost wages, and wrongful death. These quinolone lawsuits may be filed by survivors or next of kin.