Family Member to Receive a Triple Bypass Surgery? Caution


When anyone’s parent, family members, or friends undergo and invasive surgery such as a triple bypass surgery one might be a little intimidated by the thought. Feelings of nervousness, unpredictability, and loss are probably going through your mind. These are all normal feelings and it is probably very reassuring for the patient to know that you are so concerned about them. What you may not know is that bypass surgeries are the most common surgeries in the United States of America. They are performed everyday in every state of the country and with a high survival rate. Whether a triple bypass surgery is needed because of a poor diet that is clogging up their arteries, or just because it is in their genes are both reasonable explanations. What you should be afraid of is the type of drug that your family member or friend is being administered during surgery.

During the past decade a drug called Trasylol was released onto the market to control the amount of bleeding during triple bypass surgeries. During a Triple bypass surgery, the amount of blood needs to be controlled to be able to perform the bypass on the heart. Therefore there is a need for a drug to control the blood supply that is going to the heart. Trasylol, Manufactured by Bayer Pharmaceuticals, was the most predominately used drug for triple bypass surgeries. However, once patients who received the bypass surgeries started to show signs of kidney complications and failure people started to speculate. It turns out that Trasylol has been proven to cause the kidney complications and failure in the patients who were administered the drug. Even worse, Bayer knew about the adverse complications years before the FDA ever found out because they did their own private study in which their findings were astounding. What was reveled was that Trasylol did in fact cause the negative side effects of kidney complications. However, Bayer decided not to tell anyone about their findings allowing Trasylol to remain on the market.

Another issue is the cost of Trasylol. Trasylol cost $1000 per dosage, compared to $50 per dosage of other comparable drugs on the market. The FDA finally recalled Trasylol in 2007 when a private practitioner did their own study on the effects of Trasylol that ended up finding the same results that Bayer did two years later. Therefore thousands of people died because Bayer decided not to tell anyone about the adverse side effects. If your family member is going through an invasive surgery, I suggest that you do your research on the types of drugs that are commonly administered during the surgery. Talk to their doctor and go through all the small details so that your loved one is not administered a drug that could possibly lead to their death. If in your instance your family member has already seen these negative complications, contact a Trasylol attorney as soon as possible for you may be entitled to file a claim to gain compensation.