A new Benicar lawsuit joins hundreds of others pending in a federal court in New Jersey, alleging severe gastrointestinal side effects of Benicar.

Plaintiff Sharon H. of Wisconsin lists several gastrointestinal symptoms that she says she suffered since she began to take Benicar in 2007. These include includes diarrhea, weight loss, dehydration, malabsorption, and villous atrophy.

Though she says she was previously misdiagnosed with celiac disease and irritable bowel syndrome, Sharon now alleges these symptoms are side effects of Benicar. These alleged side effects also led to financial losses in the form of medical expenses, lost earnings and lost earning capacity, and loss of enjoyment of life, she says.

Benicar is a drug used to treat high blood pressure. It’s a product of Daiichi Sankyo Inc., Forest Laboratories Inc., and their associated companies, all defendants in Sharon’s Benicar lawsuit. Benicar’s active ingredient, olmesartan, is also used in drugs marketed as Benicar HCT, Azor, and Tribenzor.

About 1,300 individual lawsuits similar to Sharon’s Benicar lawsuit are pending in a multidistrict litigation, or MDL, in a New Jersey federal court. Like Sharon, the other plaintiffs in this MDL are taking issue with the tendency of Benicar and similar drugs to cause a set of gastrointestinal side effects known as sprue-like enteropathy.

According to the master long form complaint for the MDL, symptoms of sprue-like enteropathy include severe and chronic diarrhea with substantial weight loss. Villous atrophy, or the erosion of the microscopic protrusions on the inside of the small intestine, is also associated with this enteropathy. Patients with villous atrophy are at risk for serious nutritional deficiencies.

Plaintiffs allege that defendants Daiichi Sankyo and Forest Laboratories failed to properly warn physicians and patients about these side effects of Benicar. Had they been better informed, they allege, they would have avoided taking any olmesartan products.

New Benicar Lawsuit Developments

A recent court order for the MDL will allow defendant Daiichi Sankyo to hire some of the plaintiffs’ prescribing physicians as expert witnesses. Daiichi Sankyo argued that taking on plaintiffs’ doctors as their own witnesses would help prevent plaintiffs’ counsel from excessively coaching them as witnesses, potentially tainting their testimony in the plaintiffs’ favor.

In issuing that order, U.S. Magistrate Judge Joel Schneider said that the defendants’ right to retain qualified expert witnesses could be impaired if the plaintiffs’ own doctors were off limits. Such a prohibition would deprive the defendants of a fair opportunity to present their case, the judge said.

To prevent the defendants from misusing their access to the plaintiffs’ physicians, Judge Schneider imposed certain restrictions on that access. These restrictions include a limit on the number of such physicians the defendants may contact and forbidding physicians from working on a case involving their current or former patient.

One attorney working for the plaintiffs commented that he did not expect many plaintiffs’ doctors would be interested in working for the defendants.

Sharon’s Benicar lawsuit is Case No. 1:16-CV-01120 filed within the larger Benicar MDL known as In re: Benicar (Olmesartan) Products Liability Litigation, MDL No. 2606 in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.