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You suffer from atrial fibrillation, or a type of irregular heartbeat, and you’ve
been prescribed the prescription drug Pradaxa to treat your afib and to prevent future heart
attacks and strokes. My name is Dan Burke and I’m a lawyer of Parker Waichman in New
York. And I represent clients who have taken the prescription drug Pradaxa and who suffered
injury. The types of injury we are seeing in Pradaxa patients are bleeding incidents
and these are bleeds either gastro-intestinal bleeds, bleeding behind the eyes, bleeding
on the brain, or cerebral hemorrhaging or internal cranial hemorrhaging – all types
of internal bleeding events in folks who’ve taken Pradaxa. Part of the problem with this
drug is that there’s no effective antidote to the use of Pradaxa. In other words, if
bleeding starts when a patient is taking Pradaxa, it’s difficult – if not impossible – to
stop. The drug has a relatively long half-life of 12 hours, which is the time the active
drug stays in the human body. So, if a bleed begins to occur, it takes a period of time
to stop the bleed from happening and there’s really no, as I said, effective antidote.
Comparable drugs like Warfarin or many people are familiar with the term Coumadin, those
drugs all though they’re blood thinners and they have the propensity to cause bleeding,
also have a number of different steps that could be taken to stop the bleeding once it
starts. As I said in respect to Pradaxa, there’s no such effective antidote other than dialysis.
And dialysis can take several hours and all they take a portion of the effective drug
out of the body over the course of those several hours. The drug is one that’s cleared through
the kidneys, which is why dialysis works to stop the bleeding in some cases. However,
because it’s cleared through the kidneys, patients who have impaired renal function
or impaired kidney function may also have difficulty clearing the drug and the half-life
could be much longer putting them at greater risk of bleeding events. If you’ve had a
bleeding event after taken the drug Pradaxa, give me a call. I deal with questions like
this all the time. Again, my name is Dan Burke. Additionally, the types of bleeding events
don’t only include internal bleeding events or closed head bleeding events. They concern
bleeding that result out of seemingly minor trauma, such as a fall from tripping over
one’s feet or seemingly minor injuries that cause an internal bleeding event. These bleeds
can become much more serious and ultimately be fatal, because the bleeding after Pradaxa
is started is difficult if not impossible to stop. Again, my name is Dan Burke. Thanks
for taking the time to listen to me today. Have a great day.