The Treatment of Delayed Menstruation With Prostigmine

Soskin, Samuel; Wachtel, Hans; Hechter, Oscar

doi:10.1001/jama.1940.02810210022007

Cited by 25 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 2 publications

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“…Invasive pregnancy tests included eye-drop tests as well as skin reaction tests inspired by those for diphtheria, scarlet fever and tuberculosis, as well as hay fever and other allergies ( Jackson, 2007 , Smith, 2015 ). Other methods, including the prostigmine test for early pregnancy, were said to function as Primodos later would, namely, by inducing menstrual bleeding in non-pregnant women alone ( Soskin et al, 1940 ). As with parallel attempts to develop a simple colour-change reaction in a test tube, most invasive tests prior to 1950 were deemed insufficiently accurate for clinical application and were not widely adopted.…”

Section: Marketing Pills As Pregnancy Testsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A historical argument for regulatory failure in the case of Primodos and other hormone pregnancy tests

Olszynko-Gryn¹,

Bjørvik²,

Weßel³

et al. 2018

Reproductive Biomedicine & Society Online

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The drug Primodos and other hormone pregnancy tests (HPTs) remained on the British market for about a decade after they were first implicated, in 1967, as a possible cause of birth defects. In November 2017, an expert working group (EWG) set up by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) concluded against such an association. However, it was explicitly ‘not within the remit of the EWG to make formal conclusions or recommendations on the historical system or regulatory failures’, a situation that has left many stakeholders dissatisfied. Placing the question of a teratogenicity to one side, this article takes a more contextual and comparative approach than was possible under the auspices of MHRA. It asks why an unnecessary and possibly even harmful drug was allowed to remain on the British market when a reliable and perfectly safe alternative existed: urine tests for pregnancy. Based on archival research in several countries, this article builds a historical argument for regulatory failure in the case of HPTs. It concludes that the independent review which campaigners are calling for would have the potential to not only bring them a form of closure, but would also shed light on pressing issues of more general significance regarding risk, regulation and communication between policy makers, medical experts and patients.

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Section: Marketing Pills As Pregnancy Testsmentioning

confidence: 99%