Jury Awards $1.5M For Breast Cancer from Prempro

A Puerto Rican jury has awarded $1.5 million in compensation to a woman who claimed that she developed breast cancer from Prempro hormone replacement therapy (HRT). 

Helen Rivera-Adams, a 62-year-old pharmacist in San Juan, currently going through the late stages of breast cancer, filed the Prempro lawsuit against Pfizer’s Wyeth unit for failing to warn her or her doctors that the medication may increase the risk of breast cancer.

Prempro is a hormone replacement therapy (HRT) that contains a combination of the drugs Provera and Premarin. The drug was originally developed by Wyeth, which was acquired by Pfizer last year.

HRTs use hormones and progestins to artificially boost hormone levels in women undergoing menopause due to surgery or in postmenopausal women, to provide relief from symptoms such as hot flashes, irregular menstruation or weight gain.

Rivera-Adams was diagnosed with breast cancer in January 2002, after taking Prempro for about 19 months. The lawsuit sought $8 million in damages. Pfizer said it is considering its legal options.

In 2002 the National Institutes of Health released the results of studies that found women receiving HRT were at higher risk of breast cancer, strokes and heart attacks. The studies, part of the Women’s Health Initiative, sparked most of the Prempro hormone replacement therapy lawsuits currently pending throughout the country.

There are now about 9,000 lawsuits over breast cancer from Prempro pending against Pfizer’s Wyeth unit by women who claim that they developed breast cancer from the medication. All of the lawsuits claim that the drug caused plaintiffs to develop breast cancer, and that Wyeth failed to warn patients and doctors of the potential side effects of the hormone therapy.

The jury’s decision in the Rivera-Adams case, which was issued December 30, came just about one month after the Nevada Supreme Court upheld a 2007 verdict that awarded three women in that state $58 million for HRT breast cancer, and after Pfizer won a defense verdict in another trial in Virginia.