A woman from Pennsylvania says she recently had to undergo hematoma treatment after suffering a potentially fatal Xarelto bleeding injury.

Soon after her hematoma treatment, the claimant alleges she discovered that other patients had suffered serious Xarelto internal bleeding injuries and filed legal action against Bayer HealthCare and Johnson & Johnson.

Plaintiff Jane R. alleges she suffered complications after taking the blood thinner due to Xarelto’s treatment mechanism, which shut down her body’s natural ability to clot internal bleeding.

Like other anticoagulants, Xarelto works by inhibiting the body’s clotting mechanism to increase efficiency in the circulation system. This greatly reduces the chances of serious blood clots and makes Xarelto a good treatment choice for patients suffering from atrial fibrillation or are at a high chance of stroke.

With these benefits in mind, Jane agreed to Xarelto treatment and started her prescription in December 2017. However, Jane says she experienced a hematoma not long after her prescription started and had to be hospitalized. A hematoma is the collection of clotted blood in tissues. It can be a very dangerous condition.

Due to the severity of the internal bleeding incident, Jane had to be extensively hospitalized for hematoma treatment and says she is still contending with the long term effects of the injury.

Jane opted to file legal action against Bayer and Johnson & Johnson, after discovering the companies allegedly focused on aggressively marketing their anticoagulant, but failed to sufficiently discuss the drug’s serious side effects.

Overview of Xarelto Bleeding Complications

Xarelto and other anticoagulants are designed to ease circulation by inhibiting the body’s clotting mechanism, but this also puts the patient at serious risk.

With the body’s clotting mechanism shut down, the patients are unable to recover from minor internal bleeding injuries and often require emergency medical intervention. Hematoma treatment often consists of blood transfusions and extensive medical monitoring, due to how serious the long term effects are.

Xarelto entered the marketplace in 2011, one year after another blood thinning drug, Pradaxa. When Pradaxa was released in 2010, it was a significant event because it was the first medication to be released for anticoagulant treatment purposes since warfarin in the 1960s.

Pradaxa and other new generation anticoagulants quickly gained popularity for their single dose prescription feature, but they lacked an approved reversal agent for internal bleeding events until quite recently.

It was not until 2018 that Xarelto’s bleeding antidote, Andexxa, received approval from the FDA. This reversal agent is not set to become commercially available until 2019. This means that Xarelto patients did not have an approved reversal agent for the first seven years it was on the market, with the anticoagulant being linked to numerous serious injuries in patients.

In 2016, it was estimated that almost 120,000 patients were admitted for hospitalization due to uncontrollable bleeding incidents from anticoagulant treatment.

Even though hematoma treatment can be long and invasive, Bayer and Johnson & Johnson allegedly failed to fully disclose the severity of Xarelto internal bleeding to patients. Jane states she would not have agreed to take Xarelto if she had known about the drug’s potential complications.

Jane’s Xarelto lawsuit is joining MDL No. 2592, where it will stand alongside other claims alleging patients had to undergo hematoma treatment from serious bleeding injuries.

The Xarelto Lawsuit is Case No. 2:18-cv-13648-EEF-MBN, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana.