Why no one should take Nexium and it should never have been approved [View all]

[salvorhardin]

I've never had a need for proton pump inhibitors, but if I did, I wouldn't have known that Nexium is, functionally, just double strength Prilosec.

What does this have to do with Nexium and why you shouldn't take it? The only active ingredient in Nexium is the exact same thing as the only active ingredient in omeprazole (Prilosec), a (now) generic drug made by the same company, which is over the counter and four to eight times cheaper. AstraZeneca just figured out how to purify out the active component from omeprazole, the S-enantiomer esoomprazole.

In clinical trials the only difference between Nexium and its off-patent parent drug are modest improvements in some symptoms at distant time points; however, it is standard in these trials to compare 20mg of Nexium to 20mg of Omeprazole. In other words, the trials that have justified the use of this drug compared to the generic only show that when two times the amount of the active compound is used (1 nexium = 2 omeprazole), a slight improvement in some symptoms (87% vs 90% for cure of gastroesophageal reflux disease at 8 weeks) is achieved.[1-2] This is a result that is certainly not worth 4-8 times the cost.

Based on patent law AstraZeneca should never have been able to patent esoomeprazole as a new drug since they had already patented the same active ingredient when they patented prilosec. They effectively patented the same drug twice, thus doubling the time their drug can avoid generic competition. However, in order for the scam to work they had to pull one over on the regulators (coincidentally they spent millions in lobbying congress the year before Nexium was approved), then advertise the hell out of Nexium to make it appear it was somehow superior to it's chemically identical sibling drug Prilosec.

The take home message? Buy prilosec/omeprazole. It's generic. It's over the counter. If you want your insurance to cover it have your doc write a prescription for a bunch of pills so it falls under your co-pay. Save the healthcare system 5 billion a year and ditch this scam of a pill.

Link: http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2012/01/why_no_one_should_take_nexium.php