The U.S. FDA asked Pfizer on Friday, December 19, 2004, to temporarily suspend its Celebrex ads, heavily rotated on television and in magazine ads, while it reviews new study data linking Celebrex to an elevated risk of heart attacks.

Pfizer announced Friday that a National Institutes of Health cancer study found that patients on 800-milligram doses of Celebrex had twice the risk of suffering heart attacks while on the medication. The FDA urged doctors to consider prescribing alternatives medications rather than Celebrex.

Celebrex is a Cox-2 inhibitor similar to the drug Vioxx, which was recalled September 29 after the FDA admitted that numerous studies linking Vioxx to deaths by cardiac arrest and stroke showed a risk with Vioxx that outweighed the pain-relieving benefits of the drug.

In 2003, almost 27 million prescriptions were written for Celebrex, making it the most popular COX-2 inhibitor on the market.

Source: “Pfizer Suspends Celebrex ads,” Reuters, December 19, 2004; “Thomas Ginsberg, “Celebrex Linked to Heart Attacks,” Knight Ridder Newspapers, December 18, 2004.