AstraZeneca Accused of Downplaying Seroquel Diabetes Risk

Orlando, FLDefective product personal injury, together with the alleged attempts by Seroquel manufacturer AstraZeneca to downplay concern over diabetes and weight gain, have combined to foster lawsuits by upwards of 15,000 Seroquel patients.

Now, the order by a federal judge in Orlando to unseal sales call notes made by AstraZeneca representatives paints a vivid picture as to how AstraZeneca employees attempted to mitigate concern over diabetes risk involving Seroquel.

According to a Bloomberg News report that appeared September 23rd in the Wilmington, Delaware News Journal, a saleswoman employed by AstraZeneca told a US doctor that Seroquel did not cause diabetes and downplayed the concern. This, four years after AstraZeneca warned physicians in Japan as to Seroquel's links with the disease.

It was in 2002 that AstraZeneca alerted Japanese physicians after the manufacturer received reports of diabetes-related cases tied to Seroquel, "where causality with the drug could not be ruled out."

Four years later the AstraZeneca sales rep joined a colleague in meeting with a physician who was complaining of "getting a lot of flak" from patients with regard to reports of diabetes risk.

According to the contents of the sales call notes, the AstraZeneca employee assured the doctor "there has been no causative effect" linking Seroquel and diabetes. As a result of that assurance, the doctor "said he would not quit writing" prescriptions for Seroquel "due to this, at this time," the employee reported in her call notes.

In a similar example, another Seroquel representative reported to his superiors at AstraZeneca in 2005 that he had "discussed weight gain associated with atypicals (the class of drug to which Seroquel belongs)" with a doctor. He went on to report in his notes that he assured the doubting physician of a low incidence of weight gain amongst Seroquel users and encouraged the doctor to make Seroquel his "first line choice."

Seroquel Side Effects Pooh-Poohed

Another revelation surfaced earlier when other documents were unsealed. According to Bloomberg, AstraZeneca coached its sales force in the art of deflecting questions about weight gain associated with Seroquel. One AstraZeneca manager, in a 2005 voicemail, offered the US sales force information they could employ to "neutralize customer objections to Seroquel's weight and diabetes profile."

According to Bloomberg the potential for diabetes and weight gain had been observed in some clinical trials—thus the concern was known at the time Seroquel was approved in 1997. Evidence suggests that AstraZeneca attempted to downplay that risk. While the manufacturer warned doctors in Japan over the importance of monitoring blood-sugar levels in 2002, that same warning wasn't made to US doctors until two years later.