The Levin Papantonio law firm has filed suit (Case 5:24-cv-02524) against Pfizer, Upjohn and related companies on behalf of Alicia Wilson from Upland, CA. The lawsuit alleges inadequate warnings about Depo-Provera’s potential link to meningiomas, a type of brain tumor.
On (we don’t) color on the dog, LP attorney Chris Paulos discussed the drug.
“Depo-Provera is most commonly prescribed as a contraceptive for birth control,” he said. “It was originally approved to help treat heavy menstrual bleeding, uterine cancers and things in the fifties and sixties, but slowly became used off-label, mostly as an injectable contraceptive. It’s the only product that is used that is an injection, and it’s administered every basically 90 days to prevent contraception.”
Paulos touched on how Depo-Provera was tested and eventually received FDA approval.
“The first thing that Upjohn did was they took this synthetic hormone that they made, and they started using it in human populations in about 76 countries outside the United States that had less stringent safety standards or no FDA type entity in those countries at all,” he said. “But when they first started testing this on humans, it was in the early seventies, and they had two investigational new drug programs going on here in the United States. One focused on the use of Depo-Provera with women to prevent pregnancy. And then the other was done at Johns Hopkins University involving men and the process of chemical castration.”
Though the drug wasn’t approved to be used as a contraceptive, doctors prescribed it to thousands of women. So many prescriptions were written that Congress held a hearing on the rampant use of Depo-Provera for an unapproved use, according to Paulos.
By the time the FDA approved it as a contraceptive product in the early nineties, the attorney said, “At that point, there were so many people using it already for that purpose.”
A large epidemiological study published last April examined tens of thousands of patients in France over multiple years. The researchers investigated the relationship between Depo-Provera use and the development of meningiomas, a type of brain tumor.
“They determined after adjusting for confounding variables and other potential causes that women who use Depo-Provera for any more than about two administrations are at an increased risk of developing a brain tumor called a meningioma,” said Paulos. “And if you use Depo-Provera between three and five years, your chances of developing those types of brain tumors shoot up 500-fold.”
With nearly 2 million U.S. women having used Depo-Provera, attorneys anticipate thousands of cases and file a petition to consolidate the lawsuits in multidistrict litigation.
Levin Papantonio Attorney Chelsie Green has written an article on Depo-Provera for the Florida Justice Association (FJA). The piece will be published in the January/February issue of the FJA Journal.
Watch the video here towards the end.
Listen to the audio:
Photo Licensed under the Unsplash+ License
My mother took these early birth-control pills and was diagnosed with breast cancer at 36 and died a few years later. Upon death, they discovered a very large brain tumor. I’m glad that they are doing more research. Prayers to all those suffering from cancer and its effects.