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Posted On June 8, 2020 News,Product Recalls
Nearly 80 million patients in the United States take metformin to manage diabetes and other health conditions. New laboratory testing shows that some batches of this diabetes drug have been contaminated with unacceptably high levels of a carcinogen.
Is your metformin recalled? Could your diabetes medication have been the cause of your cancer? And what should you do now?
Doctors have prescribed the drug to 120 million patients worldwide, according to Healthline. Users of metformin include:
Although the FDA has only approved metformin for the treatment of type-2 diabetes, the drug is widely used off-label to treat many other conditions.
And, when a drug like metformin gets recalled due to contamination with a carcinogen, that means an even greater number of patients may have suffered harm because of it.
In May 2020, the FDA identified five pharmaceutical companies that produced the batches of metformin that, according to the agency’s laboratory tests, contained unacceptably high levels of NDMA.
As of early June 2020, four of those companies have initiated recalls of 28 products:
Not all metformin has been recalled. Only extended-release, not immediate-release, metformin was recalled, and only certain batches and lots made by certain manufacturers.
The reason these metformin medications are being recalled is because they have been found to contain an impurity known as NDMA.
NDMA is a known animal carcinogen and a probable human carcinogen. There’s a great deal of research to back up its reputation for causing numerous kinds of cancer.
NDMA is dangerous, yet common. It’s found in the air, the soil, the water, and many consumer products, from the food we eat to the detergents we use for cleaning. Because exposure to very small amounts of NDMA is unavoidable, the FDA has set a maximum “reasonably safe” daily intake amount of 0.096 micrograms, or 96 nanograms.
What this means is that consuming or more than this tiny billionth of a gram on a daily basis could raise your risk for cancer. According to online pharmacy Valisure, which conducted independent laboratory testing of metformin, several of the affected batches of metformin contained more than 10 times that amount. The medication that performed the worst in testing for NDMA had 16 times that “reasonably safe” amount.
Now imagine ingesting 16 times what’s recommended as the maximum exposure – on top of whatever other environmental or dietary exposure you might have – every single day, for years, decades, even a lifetime.
The cancer-causing impact of NDMA is believed to be cumulative. It’s easy to see how a patient exposed to the carcinogen by their diabetes medication could continue unknowingly stacking their cancer risk higher and higher as the years pass.
The combination of numerous laboratory research on animal subjects and years of observational studies of humans who have been exposed to NDMA shows that the chemical can cause or contribute to developing numerous kinds of cancer.
Some of the cancers most closely related to NDMA contamination include:
Cancer is, unfortunately, a medical event that happens all too often without an obvious cause. To determine if it’s likely that NDMA what caused you to develop cancer, a metformin injury lawsuit attorney may explore questions like:
Generally, if you used metformin for a while before developing cancer and developed a rare cancer for which you didn’t have risk factors, there’s a strong chance that NDMA from your diabetes medication could be to blame.
