Other investigators are pursuing more rigorous research that promises a more conclusive understanding of the diet-drug mystery. Perhaps the best data to date will be presented next month at the North American Association for the Study of Obesity meeting in Cancun, Mexico, by Mehmood Khan, a researcher at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis. For the moment, the new data from doctors who have found lower abnormality rates offer some support to those who criticize the FDA's handling of the diet drugs. He says he has tested 25 of his patients without finding a heart problem. We've done our job.
Some doctors support the recall.
Altogether, six million people in the U.S. took one of the two drugs. The new reports on 750 cases come from interviews with doctors who have been performing echocardiograms on diet-drug patients in the weeks since the recall. Many of these cardiologists are puzzled by why their tests are spotting a lower valve-trouble rate than the FDA first found. We're just not seeing it. At Duke University, cardiologist Thomas Ryan reports testing about 28 patients and finding no problems.