Safety and efficacy of tegaserod therapy in patients with irritable bowel syndrome or chronic constipation.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Tegaserod, a 5-HT4 agonist, is effective for treating irritable bowel syndrome and chronic constipation. However, sales of this drug were recently suspended due to concerns about a higher rate of cardiovascular events in patients receiving tegaserod over placebo in clinical trials. Our aim was to review patients in our practice prescribed tegaserod to determine if any of them had suffered a cardiovascular event or other significant adverse effects while on this therapy. Additionally, we attempted to determine the efficacy of tegaserod in clinical practice. METHODS: Patients with irritable bowel syndrome or chronic constipation in our practice prescribed tegaserod were identified through a search of billing codes and charts reviews. These patients were contacted and questioned about symptoms of cardiovascular events or other adverse events while on tegaserod. The efficacy of this drug was determined by a symptom scale during and after stopping tegaserod. RESULTS: Sufficient data for analysis was retrieved for 51 of 67 patients prescribed tegaserod. Of these, 37 patients (72.5%) experience no adverse events and 14 patients (27.4%) experienced at least one adverse event, including 6 patients (11.8%) with major adverse events (2 patients (3.9%) with atypical chest pain; 4 patients (7.8%) with syncope; and 2 patients (3.9%) who died. One patient died from advanced pancreatic cancer. The other, who had multiple cardiovascular risk factors as well as a previous myocardial infarction, suffered a cardiac arrest 2 days postoperatively following a below knee amputation, and had actually been off tegaserod for 7 days after hospital admission. Patients graded the severity of both abdominal pain and constipation as worse after stopping therapy compared to during therapy (p<0.0002 and p<0.0001, respectively). CONCLUSIONS: The risk of cardiovascular events during tegaserod therapy may be increased in patients with other risk factors. However, this drug is effective for treating irritable bowel syndrome and chronic constipation, and might be used in a select patient population with severe symptoms but without other risk factors for cardiovascular events.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".