FREE NEJM E-TOC    HOME   |   SUBSCRIBE   |   CURRENT ISSUE   |   PAST ISSUES   |   COLLECTIONS   |   Search Term  Advanced Search

Sign in | Get NEJM's E-Mail Table of Contents — Free | Subscribe

Previous Volume 360:103-106 January 8, 2009 Number 2 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

	Full Text PDF PDA Full Text Purchase this article Add to Personal Archive Add to Citation Manager Notify a Friend E-mail When Cited E-mail When Letters Appear PubMed Citation

Old drugs usually fade away. Sometimes, however, they leave surprising legacies. In 1997, for example, a study comparing the effects of brand-name and generic formulations of levothyroxine led to an uproar over the discovery that the manufacturer of the brand-name product suppressed publication of the result that the two formulations were equivalent. Recently, lawsuits alleging damages from illegal marketing of another old drug, gabapentin (Neurontin), have yielded remarkable discoveries about the structure and function of pharmaceutical marketing.

Patented in 1977 and approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1993 in doses of up to 1800 mg per day . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Source Information

Dr. Landefeld is a professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Geriatrics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), San Francisco; associate chief of staff for geriatrics and extended care at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center (SFVAMC), San Francisco; and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA. Dr. Steinman is an assistant professor of medicine at UCSF and a staff physician at SFVAMC.

This article has been cited by other articles:

• Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2009). Adverse Events in Randomized Trials: Neglected, Restricted, Distorted, and Silenced. Arch Intern Med 169: 1737-1739 [Full Text]  
• Vaccarino, V., Bremner, J. D., Kelley, M. E. (2009). JUPITER: A Few Words of Caution. Circ Cardiovasc Qual Outcomes 2: 286-288 [Full Text]