Most recalled medical devices received speedy FDA review (LAT)

[somone]

http://www.latimes.com/health/la-na-medical-devices-20110215,0,4206876.story

Most recalled medical devices received speedy FDA review
More than 70% of pulled devices were cleared for market under an abbreviated agency protocol, a five-year study has found. A study coauthor calls the process inadequate.
By Andrew Zajac, Washington Bureau

A disproportionate number of medical devices recalled because of possible links to serious health problems or deaths — including external defibrillators and insulin infusion pumps — were approved under an abbreviated process that did not require advance testing on patients, according to a five-year study of such recalls.

More than 70% of the 113 recalled devices were cleared for market under a shorter Food and Drug Administration review because they were deemed similar to products already on the market, the study found. Cardiovascular devices, chiefly external defibrillators, made up nearly a third of the recalled medical products from 2005 through 2009, the time covered by the review. A 2006 study linked defibrillator failure to more than 300 deaths over a 10-year period. Only 21 of the recalls in the new study involved products approved after clinical trials. Eighty had been approved under the shorter process. Eight were exempt from FDA regulations, and four were counterfeit or categorized as "other."

The findings, published Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine, showed that a recent update of the FDA's abbreviated review process, known as 510(k), was inadequate, said Diana Zuckerman, one of the study's coauthors. Medical device companies have stretched the notion of "similar" far beyond regulators' intention when the law went on the books in 1976, said Zuckerman, president of the National Research Center for Women & Families. "The law has gotten looser and looser over time."

The FDA should increase the number of devices subject to the stricter review, known as pre-market approval, or devise an intermediate category with more rigor than the 510(k) process, said Steven Nissen, a Cleveland Clinic cardiologist and a study coauthor. The findings buttress a 2009 Government Accountability Office report that dozens of high-risk devices did not meet the legal standard for abbreviated review, Nissen said...

[Hannah Bell]

1. The process is corrupt. So is peer review. Corrupted by too much money, of that i'm convinced.