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Nature 441, 262 (18 May 2006) | doi:10.1038/441262a; Published online 17 May 2006

How does a painkiller harm the heart?

Meredith Wadman

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Studies shed light on where Vioxx went wrong.

It was Garret FitzGerald, the chair of pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania, who first proposed that the painkiller Vioxx and its cousins might cause heart attacks by tipping a crucial hormonal balance. So neither of two attention-grabbing data sets published this month has come as a great surprise to him, despite the implications the data are likely to have for the 11,500 lawsuits from former patients that dog the drug's manufacturer, Merck.