Nexium Kidney Injury Lawsuit

Our lawyers are looking for Nexium and Prilosec lawsuit cases. This litigation is hopefully winding down soon and there are deadlines to file a lawsuit with the statute of limitations.  There are now over 13,000 PPI kidney injury lawsuits pending as of January 2022 that have been filed by victims seeing financial compensation. If you think you may have a potential kidney injury lawsuit, call 1-800-553-8082 or get a free online consultation here.

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Nexium® (esomeprazole magnesium) is a drug manufactured and distributed by AstraZeneca. The pills are famously purple. It was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in February 2001, for the treatment of numerous stomach conditions such as the following:

• Dyspepsia (upset stomach, indigestion, impaired digestion);
• Peptic Ulcer Disease (PUD);
• Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease (GERD);
• Laryngopharyngeal Reflux (LPR), also known as Extraesophageal Reflux Disease (EERD);
• Barrett’s Esophagus (a pre-cancerous condition where normal cells in the lining of the esophagus develop into abnormal cells which can lead to adenocarcinoma (esophageal cancer);
• Prevention of stress gastritis (type of ulcer caused by stress);
• Adenocarcinoma (cancer of the esophagus);
• Zollinger-Ellison Syndrome (gastric acid hypersecretion, severe peptic ulceration, and non-beta cell islet tumor of the pancreas (gastrinoma); and
• Other forms of hypersecretion of stomach acid

Nexium is most readily available in capsule form of twenty to forty-milligram dosages and is taken once or twice per day depending on the doctor’s instructions for no more than fourteen days. It may be administered for longer periods under a doctor’s instruction. It is also less commonly available as an injection administered intravenously.

Nexium Is a Wildly Successful Drug

Nexium is AstraZeneca’s best-selling drug and the third best-selling medication in the world generating billions of dollars in sales. One statistic that stood out to us.  At one point, 7.8% of US adults had used prescription PPI Products within the last 30 days.  That is what you call a wildly popular drug.  

Esomeprazole is now produced by several pharmaceutical companies under the brand names Prilosec, Aciphex, Dexilant, Zegrid, Prevacid, and Protonics, as well as its generic formulation, Omeprazole.

How Nexium Works

PPIs like Nexium work by impeding the secretion of stomach acid. Nexium binds with the proton pump. This works to inhibit the ability of the gastric parietal cell to secrete gastric acid. So Nexium acts to shut down acid production of the active acid pumps in the stomach. The result is less hydrochloric acid in the stomach which decreases the patient's symptoms. 

The medication belongs to a class of drug called Proton Pump Inhibitors (PPI) which is designed to cause a pronounced and long-lasting reduction in gastric acid. It has more or less replaced the use of h4 Receptor Antagonists. The results and similar but the mechanism of action is different.  

The main difference between the two classes is the PPIs stop the production of gastric acid, whereas the h4-type drugs block the action of histamine on parietal cells (outer lining) in the stomach which decreased the production of acid by these cells.

Drugs belonging to this class generally are well tolerated by patients, and serious adverse effects from short-term use of the medication are rare. The common side effects are headaches, nausea, diarrhea, abdominal pain, fatigue, and dizziness. Adverse effects of omeprazole, although all PPIs carry the same risks, are reported more often than other PPIs mainly because it is prescribed more often than other PPIs.

Long-term use of Proton Pump Inhibitors has been linked to hypomagnesemia, an electrolyte disturbance in which there is an abnormally low level of magnesium in the blood. The body uses its gastric acid to release Vitamin B-12 into the blood and because PPIs inhibit the production of stomach acid, it is believed its use on a long-term basis can lead to a deficiency in B-12. 

Infrequently, adverse side effects such as rash, itch, flatulence, constipation, anxiety, and depression are reported. Idiosyncratic reactions such as erythema multiforme (redness of the skin, caused by hyperemia of the capillaries in the lower layers of the skin), pancreatitis, Stevens-Johnson syndrome (a potentially deadly skin disease), and Acute Interstitial Nephritis are reported but occur rarely.

Also, studies have shown that long-term use of h4-receptor Antagonists and Proton Pump Inhibitors are associated with an increased risk of community-acquired pneumonia. 

Researchers suspect that the suppression of gastric acid causes an insufficient elimination of pathogenic organisms. Therefore, patients who fall into the high-risk category for pneumonia should only be prescribed PPIs, and like medications, at lower dosages and for as short of a time as possible, and only when necessary. The medicine also has been shown to raise the risk of Clostridium difficile infection  (a bacterium associated with colitis), by 1.7 times for those patients who are administered the medication once daily. The risk increases by 2.4 times in those who take the medication twice daily.

Nexium Kidney Injuries

Growing research tells us that Nexium and other proton pump inhibitors (PPI) like Prilosec may cause patients to develop chronic kidney disease and end-stage kidney failure is two-and-a-half times more like to occur with PPIs.

The long-term use of PPIs were not well studied. But the evidence has been pouring in recent years and the results are not encouraging.  therefore, potential kidney injuries caused by Nexium and lawsuits stemming from such adverse effects are going to require future studies to affirm how Plaintiffs’ attorneys believe the evidence may play out. One thing is for certain and requires no further evidence: these types of kidney injuries are awful.

Since the early 90s, there have been suggestions in the medical literature about a possible association between drugs like Nexium and acute kidney injuries.  The first article was from the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center that reported PPI usage was associated with kidney failure and other injuries. But most of the literature was case studies that concluded with something to the effect that "more studies should be done."  

More studies were done. The Journal of the American Society of Nephrology put out a study in 2016 that exacerbated calls to take a closer look at Nexium. The study compared acid reflux drug kidney risks among users of PPIs with another class of heartburn drugs. Over five years, researchers found that 15% of  PPI users ended up with chronic kidney disease. That is a big number, right? The study also suggests that injury and the degree of injury may be dose-responsive. In other words, the longer and the more of the drug that you took, the greater your risk of developing a kidney injury.

In 2007, a Journal of Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapeutics. titled, “Systematic review: proton pump inhibitor-associated acute interstitial nephritis.” The authors found that the long-term use of PPIs like Nexium was associated with interstitial nephritis.

Other articles have continued along these same lines: PPI increases the risk of kidney disease. 

Nexium Class Action Lawsuit

Product liability attorneys continue to review potential Nexium, Prilosec, and other PPI lawsuits for kidney injuries (not bone fractures suffered by users of the medication throughout the county. If you think you may have a potential lawsuit, call a Nexium lawyer at 1-800-553-8082 or get a free online consultation here.