Total sales of Nuedexta reached almost $300 million that year. The number of pills rose to roughly 14 million in 2016, a jump of nearly 400% in just four years, according to data obtained from QuintilesIMS, which tracks pharmaceutical sales. Since 2012, more than half of all Nuedexta pills have gone to long-term care facilities. In her former nursing home, Lenore Greenfield was diagnosed with PBA and prescribed Nuedexta by California psychiatrist Romeo Isidro, a physician who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in promotional payments from Avanir.
Nuedexta’s financial success, however, is being propelled by a sales force focused on expanding the drug’s use among elderly patients suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, and high-volume prescribing and advocacy efforts by doctors receiving payments from the company, CNN found. This condition afflicts less than 1% of all Americans, based on a calculation using the drugmaker’s own figures, and it is most commonly associated with people who have multiple sclerosis (MS) or ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The pill, called Nuedexta, is approved to treat a disorder marked by sudden and uncontrollable laughing or crying – known as pseudobulbar affect, or PBA. The maker of a little red pill intended to treat a rare condition is raking in hundreds of millions of dollars a year as it aggressively targets frail and elderly nursing home residents for whom the drug may be unnecessary or even unsafe, a CNN investigation has found.Īnd much of the money is coming straight from the federal government.