Osteoporosis Drugs May Increase Risk of Jaw Disease
January 5, 2009 by admin
Filed under Personal Injury
A new study is suggesting that common osteoporosis drugs that are meant to help build bones in patients have the potential to cause a jaw disease known as ONJ or Osteonecrosis of the Jaw. The results appear January 1 in the Journal of the American Dental Association.
The FDA is warning that Fosamax, a popular osteoporosis drug and others like it could increase the risk of a jaw infection known as osteonecrosis of the jaw or ONJ. The disease brings infection, soft-tissue swelling, loose teeth and exposed bone.
The warning is based on a study by Dr. Parish Sedghizadeh, an assistant professor of clinical dentistry at the University of Southern California School of Dentistry in Los Angeles. Dr Sedghizadeh said his clinic is seeing one to four new cases a week vs one a year in years past.
In response to the findings of the study, Merck issued a statement saying the new study “has material methodological flaws and scientific limitations, making it unreliable as a source for valid scientific conclusions regarding the prevalence of ONJ in patients taking alendronate.”
Here’s a good recap from ScienceNews.org: Bone-growth Drugs May Increase Jaw Disease Risk
An excerpt from ScienceNews:
Jawbone disease is “absolutely rare, and one of the least likely bones to get infected,” says study coauthor Parish Sedghizadeh, a dentist and researcher at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Over the last several years, Sedghizadeh and other dentists at the University of Southern California noticed a rise in the number of patients who came in with the unusual and hard-to-treat jaw infection. “All of a sudden, we saw this raging epidemic of jawbone infections,” prompting the researchers to scrutinize the electronic medical records of dental patients at USC.
From sifting through thousands of such records, the researchers found that nine of 208 current USC patients — or four percent — who were taking or had taken bisphosphonates for any amount of time in the past five years also had jawbone necrosis diagnoses. Of the 13,522 control patients not taking the bone-building drugs, none were diagnosed with jawbone necrosis.
But Aliya Khan, a doctor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, points out that four of the nine patients found by the new study to have jaw necrosis had “additional risk factors,” including cancer, diabetes and steroid treatment. “From this study it cannot be concluded that the alendronate was a causal factor in the development of osteonecrosis,” says Khan, who has consulted for drug companies including Merck. “We need to obtain prospective, good quality data” on the causes and incidence of jaw osteonecrosis.”
