A woman from Texas says taking Benicar HCT caused her to develop gastrointestinal pain severe enough to require hospitalization.

Plaintiff Braulia S. says she started using Benicar HCT in May 2008. She claims that as a result of her treatment with Benicar HCT, she developed chronic and severe diarrhea with severe abdominal and gastrointestinal pain.

Her Benicar side effects required hospitalization and medical treatment, she claims. She further alleges these side effects and the treatment they required severely limited her ability to engage in social, familial and other activities, causing her severe emotional stress and anxiety.

Benicar is a medication used to control high blood pressure. It’s also known as olmesartan. The FDA approved olmesartan in 2002 as a treatment for hypertension.

Some medications combine olmesartan with other cardiovascular drugs. The Benicar HCT that Braulia took is a combination of olmesartan and hydrochlorothiazide. Azor combines olmesartan with amlodipine, and Tribenzor is a combination of all three ingredients. Together these drugs are sometimes referred to as the Benicar Family.

All four of these brand-name olmesartan drugs are the center of attention in a wave of products liability litigation against Daiichi Sankyo and Forest Laboratories, the pharmaceutical companies that make and market olmesartan.

These Benicar lawsuits are brought by plaintiffs like Braulia who say they suffered severe gastrointestinal pain and related side effects after taking Benicar.

Benicar Family Linked to Severe Gastrointestinal Pain and Other Symptoms

Benicar has been associated with reports of a gastrointestinal condition known as sprue-like enteropathy. The trademark symptoms of this condition are severe and persistent diarrhea with extraordinary weight loss. Patients can also suffer significant malnutrition, dehydration, and gastrointestinal pain.

Persons with this condition can also develop villous atrophy, an erosion of the inner surface of the small intestine. Villous atrophy impairs the body’s ability to absorb nutrients from food and can lead to clinical malnutrition.

The FDA publicized this risk of sprue-like enteropathy in a July 2013 drug safety communication. The agency noted it had received nearly two dozen reports of patients who had suffered severe gastrointestinal pain, diarrhea, and other related symptoms after taking olmesartan-based drugs.

In all of those cases, the FDA said, the patients’ symptoms improved after they stopped taking olmesartan. Similar results were reported in a set of case studies published by the Mayo Clinic.

Plaintiffs in the Benicar litigation generally claim the drug’s manufacturers failed to adequately warn them about the risk of sprue-like enteropathy associated with Benicar and other olmesartan drugs.

In anticipation of a large number of Benicar lawsuits, the federal Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation created a multidistrict litigation, or MDL, to handle them all together.

The Benicar MDL was set up in April 2015 in a federal court in New Jersey, in the interest of avoiding redundant pretrial procedures in potentially thousands of similar claims. To date, the Benicar MDL is hosting about 1,900 active pending Benicar lawsuits.

The Benicar MDL is In re: Benicar (Olmesartan) Products Liability Litigation, MDL No. 2606, in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey. Braulia’s Benicar HCT Lawsuit is Case No. 1:17-cv-01450.