Ocella Lawsuit Filed Over Stroke Caused by Generic Yaz / Yasmin

A lawsuit has been filed in federal court claiming that Ocella birth control, a generic version of Bayer’s Yasmin and Yaz, caused an Iowa woman to suffer a stroke and other side effects.

The Ocella lawsuit was filed by Andrienne Cechura and her husband Kenneth, on December 28, 2009 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa. The complaint was filed against Bayer Healthcare, and several of their subsidiaries, including Berlex Laboratories, which originally developed Yasmin birth control in 2001.

According to the complaint, Andrienne Cechura was prescribed Ocella, a generic version of Bayer’s birth control pill, which was sold by a generic drug maker under a licensing agreement with Bayer. The lawsuit alleges that side effects of Ocella caused Cechura to suffer a serious and life-threatening stroke after taking the birth control pill between April 2009 and July 2009.

Ocella, Yaz and Yasmin all contain a combination of ethinyl estradiol and drospirenone, a new type of progestin that is unique to these birth control pills. Drospirenone, or drsp, impacts the body’s normal mechanism of regulating a balance between salt and water, which could result in elevated potassium levels and potentially serious health problems.

In June 2008, Bayer and Teva Pharmaceutical’s Barr subsidiary reached an agreement where Barr purchased a generic version of Yasmin from Bayer and sold it under the Ocella brand.

Earlier this month, Cechura’s lawsuit over Ocella was transferred to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois, where it will be consolidated with more than 225 other Yaz suits and Yasmin suits filed against Bayer. The cases all involve women who allege that the drug maker failed to adequately research their medication or warn about the risk of suffering a blood clot or other serious injury, such as a stroke, heart attack, pulmonary embolism, deep vein thrombosis, gallbladder disease or sudden death.

According to an August 2009 birth control study published in the British Medical Journal, pills containing drospirenone, such as Yaz, Yasmin and Ocella, carry a 6.3 times increased risk of a first deep vein thrombosis or pulmonary embolism. When compared to women taking some other types of oral birth control, the increased risk was nearly four timers more among users of Yaz, Yasmin and Ocella type birth control.