Woman Awarded $56.5 Million in Fen-Phen Case

American Home Products Corp. said Friday that a Texas jury has awarded a woman $56.5 million for heart damage she said was caused by two company diet drugs once used in the fen-phen weight-loss cocktail.

The Madison, N.J.-based drug maker said it planned to appeal the decision. It said the award and potential awards in other diet drug lawsuits are adequately covered by $12.3 billion in charges the firm took last year.

AHP has already reached a national settlement with tens of thousands of U.S. patients who had filed lawsuits alleging they had not been adequately warned about dangers of taking the two diet drugs, Pondimin (fenfluramine) and Redux (dexfenfluramine), which were recalled in 1997.

To make fen-phen, patients combined either Pondimin or Redux with an amphetamine-like drug called phentermine, which remains on the market.

Some former users of AHP’s two diet drugs have opted out of the settlement and are continuing to press lawsuits against AHP, including Gloria Lopez, the woman who won the award earlier this week from a jury in Alice, Texas.

AHP spokesman Lowell Weiner said that the jury verdict was rendered earlier this week, and that Lopez had claimed fen-phen damaged her heart valves.

“While we are disappointed by the jury’s decision, there appears to be solid legal ground for a significant change in the outcome of this case, including a reduction in the amount of the award in the short term and reversal of the award in its entirety in the long term on appeal,” Louis Hoynes, general counsel for the drug firm, said in a statement.

Hoynes said Texas has a statutory limit on the amount that can be awarded in punitive damages, which he added “will substantially reduce the award” to Lopez.

AHP recalled its two diet drugs after U.S. regulators expressed concern that some of the 6 million Americans who had taken the fen-phen cocktail had developed signs of possible heart-valve damage.

The company has said several hundred other former fen-phen users have been diagnosed with a potentially deadly condition known as primary pulmonary hypertension, in which arteries from the lung to the heart are damaged by high blood pressure.

These patients were not included in the company’s national settlement. Instead, AHP is negotiating settlements with those patients or battling it out with them and their families in court.

Shares of AHP were down 52 cents to close at $57.77 on the New York Stock Exchange.