A Texas woman says her mother’s death was connected to injuries she suffered due to Xarelto life-threatening internal bleeding.

Plaintiff Maria N. is bringing this Xarelto lawsuit on behalf of her late mother Leonor’s estate.

Maria says Leonor began taking Xarelto in September 2014 and kept taking it until around the next December.

That month, Leonor suffered an episode of Xarelto life-threatening internal bleeding, Maria says, resulting in “severe and permanent personal injuries, pain, suffering, and emotional distress.”

Leonor died later in October 2016. Maria says her death can be attributed to the residual effects of her Xarelto life-threatening internal bleeding.

Challenging the Warnings for Xarelto

Xarelto, or rivaroxaban, is an anticoagulant medication. It’s one of a group of similar drugs recently developed to provide an alternative to the older anticoagulant warfarin.

Among other uses, Xarelto is frequently used to prevent stroke in persons with atrial fibrillation.

Maria’s Xarelto lawsuit is part of a consolidation of many individual claims by patients who say Xarelto life-threatening internal bleeding goes beyond the risks they were led to expect from the warnings and safety information provided by the drug’s manufacturers.

These legal claims have been transferred to one federal court in Louisiana to create a multidistrict litigation, or MDL.

An MDL can help the federal court system process certain kinds of cases more efficiently. It can be useful in cases like these Xarelto lawsuits, where many different plaintiffs are suing the same defendants over roughly similar allegations.

Maria now says Xarelto’s manufacturer Janssen Pharmaceuticals failed to issue a proper warning about the risk of excessive bleeding associated with Xarelto.

She is also suing Janssen’s parent company Johnson & Johnson and Bayer, both of whom are allegedly involved in the development, manufacture and marketing of Xarelto.

According to Maria’s Xarelto lawsuit, the year leading up to June 30, 2012 saw 1,080 Xarelto-associated adverse events reported to the FDA. Of these reported events, 65 ended in death, she says.

The reports included instances of Xarelto life-threatening bleeding, eight percent of which ended in the patient’s death. By the end of fiscal 2012, the FDA had received 151 reports of deaths associated with Xarelto – compared to only 56 warfarin-related deaths during the same period.

Foreign medical regulators received similar reports, Maria says. In the first eight months of 2013, regulators in Germany had 968 reports of Xarelto adverse events, including 72 reports of death.

Despite being aware of these reports, Maria alleges, Janssen and the other defendants failed to issue a proper warning about the risk of life-threatening bleeding associated with Xarelto.

Maria’s Xarelto lawsuit raises claims for negligence, strict products liability, breach of warranty, fraudulent and negligent misrepresentation, fraudulent concealment, and fraud and deceit.

She is also bringing a claim for wrongful death, seeking compensation for Leonor’s survivors to cover their losses related to her death.

This Xarelto Lawsuit is Case No. 2:16-cv-07864 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. It’s part of the Xarelto MDL, In re: Xarelto (Rivaroxaban) Products Liability Litigation, MDL No. 2592, also in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana.