問題詳情

Passage AGlobal pharmaceutical giant Abbott Laboratories has agreed to pay federal and state governments $1.6 billion in criminaland civil fines for illegally promoting unapproved uses of its drug Depakote, including to sedate elderly patients in nursinghomes, officials announced Monday.The settlement, which includes an agreement to plead guilty to a criminal misdemeanor, is the second-largest in a stringof multimillion-dollar payouts in recent years resulting from stepped-up enforcement by the Justice Department and stateinvestigators against drugmakers that “misbrand” their products.While doctors can — and frequently do — prescribe drugs for purposes beyond those approved as “safe and effective”by the Food and Drug Administration, it is illegal for manufacturers to actively market their products for such off-label use.“Not only did Abbott engage in off-label promotion, but it targeted elderly dementia patients and down-played the risksapparent from its own clinical studies,” Tony West, acting associate attorney general, said in a statement.In 2009, Pfizer paid the largest settlement to date in such a case — $2.3 billion in connection with its marketing of drugsthat included the painkiller Bextra. Last year, British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline announced that it expects to reach a biggersettlement this year related to its development and promotion of the diabetes drug Avandia, among others.As part of the settlement, Abbott admitted that beginning in 1998 it trained a special sales force to promote Depakote tonursing-home employees as a way to control the agitation and aggression that can occur in elderly patients suffering fromdementia.In 1999, Abbott was forced to discontinue a clinical trial testing Depakote’s effectiveness against dementia when itbecame evident that the drug increased the incidence of drowsiness, dehydration and anorexia in elderly study participants. Yetthe sales team continued to push the drug to nursing homes through 2006.In its marketing, Abbott highlighted the fact that Depakote was not covered by a 1987 law designed to prevent the use ofunnecessary medications by nursing homes. So if nursing homes used it in place of other options, they could avoid theadministrative costs and burdens of complying with that law.
41. Who conducted research to support the use of Depakote?
(A) Abbott.
(B)GlaxoSmithKline.
(C) Pfizer.
(D) Meredith McCoyd.

參考答案

答案：A
難度：簡單0.818182
統計：A(45),B(4),C(4),D(0),E(0)

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