A widow filed a Xarelto lawsuit alleging uncontrolled bleeding caused by the drug cost her husband his life.

Plaintiff Carol M. of Roswell, Georgia filed the lawsuit, alleging her husband, Ralph M. died after taking Xarelto.

According to the Xarelto lawsuit, Ralph M. took Xarelto from June 2012 until his death in March 2013 when he suffered an intracranial hemorrhage, or bleeding in the brain.

Ralph was prescribed Xarelto to decrease his risk of suffering a stroke. Xarelto is a type of drug called an anticoagulant or blood thinner. Anticoagulants like Xarelto are intended to reduce the risk of developing dangerous blood clots within the body.

When the clotting process misfires, a person can suffer a deep vein thrombosis, or DVT. Parts of this clot can break off and drift through the circulatory system until they get stuck and block blood vessels.

Drugs like Xarelto reduce this risk by making it harder for blood to clot in the first place. But Xarelto lawsuits like this one allege that sometimes Xarelto works too well.

All anticoagulants carry the risk of working too well, and making it dangerously easy to bleed to death. In extreme cases, a person taking anticoagulants like Xarelto may not be able to stop bleeding from minor injuries, including minor internal injuries.

For example, a tiny injury to the lungs could cause a life-threatening pulmonary bleeding, or a brain injury could cause a dangerous brain bleed, like the one that took the life of Ralph.

One contention in the Xarelto bleeding lawsuit is that at the time of Ralph’s death, there was no known reversal agent for Xarelto. Older anticoagulants like Warfarin have known reversal agents.

In the case of Warfarin, if a patient suffers uncontrollable bleeding, doctors can administer a large dose of Vitamin K. This effectively turns off the drug. But Xarelto has no known antidote or reversal agent. The Xarelto lawsuit also asserts that there was no warning about the lack of an antidote for Xarelto, and only a brief reference to this in the overdose section of the drug information.

Carol’s Xarelto lawsuit asserts that in spite of the risk of bleeding and the lack of an antidote, the makers of Xarelto aggressively promoted the drug, spending millions advertising Xarelto.

During the year Ralph died, drug makers spent $11 million on advertising in journals. The Xarelto lawsuit states that in terms of dollars spent and pages bought, Xarelto was the most advertised pharmaceutical product in the world.

The Xarelto Lawsuit is Civil Action No. 0825, within the larger Xarelto MDL In RE: Xarelto (Rivaroxaban) Products Liability Litigation, MDL No. 2592, filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana.