A shortage of medicines in the United States that recently gained the attention of President Barack Obama is worst among about 75 products while supplies of other scarce drugs are either stable or have improved, according to a report released on Monday,
Researchers at the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics took 168 drugs officially reported in shortage as of October 7 and combined that list with IMS Health sales data to find that the problem is more concentrated than overall figures suggest.
Of the drugs that come up short, drugmakers have been providing stable supplies of 56 of them, 31 medicines became more available, but 75 products have been on a steep decline.
More than 80 percent of all affected drugs were generic injectable medications, meaning drugs without patent protection that generally treat acute disease. In fact, half of the generic injectable drugs sold in the United States were on the shortages list, according to the report.
Although all major therapy areas were affected, cancer drugs took the biggest hit, accounting for 16 percent of all medications in shortage and putting more than a half million patients at risk for unexpectedly losing access to potentially life-saving treatments, the report said.
"It's a finite and relatively small number of products that are causing the disruption," said Murray Aitken, executive director of the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics.
"Not to diminish the issue of disruption because these products are very important ... it's useful to be more specific and focused in looking at the part of the market that is especially affected."
The problem has authorities and experts perplexed and led Obama late last month to sign an executive order to address it. Just 56 drugs were reported as scare in 2006, the FDA has said.
The IMS report found great volatility in the availability of some drugs in recent years, likely linked to the simple fact that some drugmakers just stopped making those medicines.
Although almost 100 companies in all were supplying the 168 products in short supply, half of those drugs were made by only one or two suppliers, the report found.
Of the troubled 75, a single company or two companies were supplying 65 percent of them, Aitken said.
"Some (companies) have decided to stop production of these types of drugs, and if it leaves one or two suppliers, that doesn't provide a lot of flexibility when one might have a manufacturing problem of some sort," he said.
"Part of the story is there may not be sufficient economic incentive currently in this sector of the market."
The corporations supplying the most number of drugs from the shortage list were Hospira Inc and Teva Pharmaceuticals USA. Others included Novartis AG, Watson Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer and Baxter Healthcare, according to the report.
The companies most commonly report manufacturing problems, discontinuation or suspension of production and increased demand as the cause of drug shortages, said the report by IMS, a healthcare research company.
Researchers in the report based their analysis on the lists of drugs in shortage compiled by the Food and Drug Administration and American Society of Health-System Pharmacists.
Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions.