Unfortunately, many serious side effects of Uloric have been recorded by those patients who filed adverse event reports or had to go to the hospital for life threatening cardiac attacks. These patients who might not be familiar with cardiac attack symptoms could have been at risk for life threatening injuries.

Understanding Prescriptions for Uloric

Uloric is a popular medication provided for the treatment of gout. Risk factors for gout onset include recent surgery, obesity, alcohol consumption, a family history of gout and certain medications. Users say that some risks were not adequately disclosed up front, even though there was reason to disclose them to patients.

Uloric was promoted as a new treatment option that had great potential to relieve the symptoms and pain of gout sufferers. However, reports of different side effects such as the risk of cardiac attacks pointed out that Uloric could cause life threatening and severe complications.

In clinical trials, the gout drug Uloric was linked to fatal cardiovascular events more frequently than allopurinol, another medication for gout.

At the time that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Uloric to go on the market, the FDA required that a further trial would need to be completed due to the higher risk of adverse cardiovascular events revealed in early clinical trials. The follow-up study identified that patients taking Uloric faced a higher risk of cardiac attacks. One of these problems with the gout medicine Uloric had to do with a diagnosis of cardiac ischemia, which can be life threatening if not caught by doctors quickly.

The first safety communication from the FDA about updated cardiac risk came in November 2017. The study that led to that warning involved 6,000 individuals and determined that those who were using Uloric for the management of their gout had an elevated risk of non-fatal stroke, heart related death, non-fatal heart attack, and inadequate blood supply. When these symptoms were caught early on, urgent surgery was often required.

The joint panel of the Arthritis Advisory Committee and the Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee of the Food and Drug Administration voted 19 to 2 that the benefits still outweigh the risk for some patients, but that Uloric should be relegated to a second line therapy for treatment of hyperuricemia in patients with gout.

Uloric side effects like these were addressed by a whistleblower lawsuit filed against Takeda Pharmaceuticals, the manufacturer of Uloric. A former safety consultant who worked for Takeda argued that the company purposely withheld information about severe side effects tied to the drug, including bone marrow failure, drug interactions, liver damage, kidney damage and more.

Problems with Uloric have also included allegations of kidney failure. According to the whistleblower who filed a lawsuit against the Uloric manufacturers, the makers of the drug knew that the medication had a higher than average risk of interactions with other medications. The clinical trials that led to updated drug warnings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.