Patients Should Stay on Pfizer's Lipitor, Not Switch to Generic, Study Say

Switching to a generic cholesterol- lowering drug from Pfizer Inc.’s Lipitor raised heart disease rates, a study of Dutch patients found.

Researchers used a simulation to predict that 22 percent of patients taking a generic copy of Merck & Co.’s Zocor would develop heart disease during a 20-year period, compared to 20 percent of those on Lipitor, according an abstract of the study posted on the website of the European Society of Cardiology.

Doctors in the Netherlands have been required to justify prescribing brand-name cholesterol medicines since January 2009, the researchers from Pfizer and the University of Melbourne in Australia said. The study took into account that some patients were switched to the generic drug at a dose that wasn’t equivalent to the brand-name Pfizer cholesterol pill. Lipitor, the top-selling drug in the world, is set to lose patent protection next year.

Prescribing Lipitor is “sound from a health economic perspective,” the Dutch researchers said in the abstract.

The study will be presented at the European Society of Cardiology conference set to start next week in Stockholm.

To contact the reporter on this story: Naomi Kresge in Berlin at nkresge@bloomberg.net

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