During an August conference call with financial analysts, Shire specialty pharmaceuticals president Mike Cola credited the "very dynamic ADHD market" to Shire's globalization efforts and "investments we have made in new uses for our existing products."
Those uses, a.k.a. diagnoses, for Shire products like stimulants Adderall, Vyvanse and Intuniv include adult ADHD, cognitive impairment, depression and excessive daytime sleepiness.
Still, Cola says despite the 10 percent ADHD "new starts" that are helping Shire "grow the market," and the "co-administration market" of add-on prescription drug$, the ADHD franchise suffers from patients who drop out when they quit seeing their pediatrician. "We don't see those patients show up again until their mid-to-late 20s," laments Cola.
ADHD drugs, in addition to "robbing kids of their right to be kids, their right to grow, their right to experience their full range of emotions, and their right to experience the world in its full hue of colors," as Anatomy of an Epidemic author Robert Whitaker puts it, are also deadly.
A 2009 article in the American Journal of Psychiatry called Sudden Death and Use of Stimulant Medications in Youths found 1.8 percent of youthful stimulant users died sudden deaths from cardiac dysrhythmia or unexplained causes versus 0.4 percent who were not on stimulants. Though it helped fund the study, the FDA said the results proved no "real risk" and kids should keep taking their meds.
Meanwhile, says Robert Whitaker, kids on ADHD meds "are told they are going to be on these drugs for life. And next thing they know, they're on two or three or four drugs," a phenomenon also known as the co-administration market.
Foradil Aerolizer, Serevent Diskus, Advair and Symbicort
How could asthma drugs that increase the chance of dying of asthma become pharma's top sellers? The same way antidepressants that cause depression and antifracture drugs that cause fractures become top sellers: good consumer marketing.
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