Quoted from http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-23/abbott-labs-sued-by-web-designer-who-says-humira-damaged-her-optic-nerves.html
Abbott Labs Sued on Claims Humira Caused Permanent Eye Damage
By Laurel Brubaker Calkins and Margaret Cronin Fisk - May 23, 2011 2:31 PM ET
Abbott Laboratories (ABT) was sued by a New York Web designer who claimed its top-selling drug Humira, which she took for Crohn’s disease, permanently damaged her optic nerves.
The doctor who treated Jamie Bixby at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary in Brooklyn in 2008 said Bixby’s optic neuritis was “related to her use of Humira,’’ according to the lawsuit, which was filed May 20 in Chicago federal court, near the drugmaker’s headquarters in Abbott Park, Illinois.
Bixby said she was told by a nurse on the company’s telephone helpline that the eye pain she began experiencing after a month of Humira treatments wasn’t related to the drug. An eye doctor diagnosed Bixby with permanent damage to the myelin sheath of her optic nerves a month later, after she sought emergency treatment when vision in one eye became blurry with black holes.
If Abbott had warned Bixby or her gastroenterologist “that Humira could be the source of her eye pain, she would have immediately discontinued taking the drug and would have immediately obtained proper emergency medical treatment,’’ Bixby said in the complaint.
Humira, which had reported 2010 worldwide sales of $6.5 billion, is expected to outsell Roche Holding AG (ROG)'s Avastin cancer medicine by 2016 to become the world’s most lucrative drug, according to a May 2010 forecast by research company EvaluatePharma.
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