Early COX-2-inhibiting Drugs
Celebrex (and other brand names for celecoxib) was introduced in 1999 and rapidly became the most frequently prescribed new drug in the United States. By October 2000, its US sales exceeded 100 million prescriptions per year for $3 billion, and was still rising. Sales of Celebrex alone reached $3.1 billion in 2001. A Spanish study found that between January 2000 and June 2001, 7% of NSAID prescriptions and 29% of NSAID expenditures were for COX-2 inhibitors. Over the period of the study, COX-2 inhibitors rose from 10.03% of total NSAIDs prescribed by specialty physicians to 29.79%, and from 1.52% to 10.78% of NSAIDs prescribed by primary care physicians (98.23% of NSAIDs and 94.61% of COX-2 inhibitors were prescribed by primary care physicians). For specialty physicians, rofecoxib and celecoxib were third and fifth most frequently prescribed NSAIDs but first and second in cost, respectively; for primary-care physicians they were ninth and twelfth most frequently prescribed NSAIDs and first and fourth in cost.
The cause of the rapid widespread acceptance of Celebrex and Vioxx by physicians was the publication of two large trials, the Celecoxib Long-term Arthritis Safety Study CLASS study in JAMA, and the Vioxx Gastrointestinal Outcomes Research VIGOR study in the New England Journal of Medicine. Both publications concluded that COX-2 specific NSAIDs were associated with significantly fewer adverse gastrointestinal effects. In the CLASS trial comparing Celebrex 800 mg/day to ibuprofen 2400 mg/day and diclofenac 150 mg/day for osteoarthritis or rheumatoid arthritis for six months, Celebrex was significantly associated with fewer upper gastrointestinal complications (0.44% vs. 1.27%, P=0.04), with no significant difference in incidence of cardiovascular events in patients not taking aspirin for cardiovascular prophylaxis. In the VIGOR trial testing Vioxx 50 mg/day versus naproxen for rheumatoid arthritis, Vioxx reduced the risk of symptomatic ulcers and clinical upper gastrointestinal events (perforations, obstructions and bleeding) by 54%, to 1.4% from 3%, the risk of complicated upper gastrointestinal events (complicated perforations, obstructions and bleeding in the upper gastrointestinal tract) by 57%, and the risk of bleeding from anywhere in the gastrointestinal tract by 62%. An enormous marketing effort capitalized on these publications; Vioxx was the most heavily advertised prescription drug in 2000, and Celebrex the seventh, according to IMS Health.
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