Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Feet of a baby born to a mother who had taken thalidomide while pregnant. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the use of thalidomide in 46 countries was prescribed to women who were pregnant or who subsequently became pregnant, and consequently resulted in the "biggest anthropogenic medical disaster ever," with more than 10,000 children born with a range of severe deformities, such as ...
In 1961, newspapers around the world ran stories (accompanied by horrific images) of deformed babies whose mothers had taken a drug to curb nausea during pregnancy called thalidomide. A vigilant FDA inspector had refused to approve thalidomide for sale in the United States because she was worried about its safety.
Thalidomide is racemic; while S-thalidomide is the bioactive form of the molecule, the individual enantiomers can racemize to each other due to the acidic hydrogen at the chiral centre, which is the carbon of the glutarimide ring bonded to the phthalimide substituent. The racemization process can occur in vivo.
On the history of the Contergan (thalidomide) catastrophe in the light of drug legislation, Dtsch Med Wochenschr. 2001 October 19;126(42):1183-6. Shah RR., Thalidomide, drug safety and early drug regulation in the UK, Adverse Drug React Toxicol Rev. 2001 Dec;20(4):199-255.
McBride published a letter in The Lancet, in December 1961, noting a large number of birth defects in children of patients who were prescribed thalidomide, [9] after a midwife named Sister Pat Sparrow first suspected the drug was causing birth defects in the babies of patients under his care at Crown Street Women's Hospital in Sydney. [10]
Thalidomide — withdrawn in 1961 owing to widespread incidence of severe birth defects (phocomelia or tetraamelia) after prenatal use by pregnant women, US Food and Drug Administration approved thalidomide for erythema nodosum leprosum (ENL) in 1998, and 2008 for new cases of multiple myeloma (administered with dexamethasone). A large "off ...
[53] [54] [55] Later studies established that under biological conditions the (R)-thalidomide, good partner, undergoes an in vivo metabolic inversion to the (S)-thalidomide, evil partner and vice versa. It is a bidirectional chiral inversion. Hence the argument that the thalidomide tragedy could have been avoided by using a single enantiomer is ...
The thalidomide molecule is a synthetic derivative of glutamic acid and consists of a glutarimide ring and a phthaloyl ring (Figure 5). [15] [16] Its IUPAC name is 2-(2,6-dioxopiperidin-3-yl)isoindole-1,3-dione and it has one chiral center [15] After thalidomide's selective inhibition of TNF-α had been reported, a renewed effort was put in thalidomide's clinical development.