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Every day, for fourteen years, Emmanuelle took a tablet of Androcur . Until she discovered that the drug had favored the development of five tumors in her brain.
Emmanuelle Huet-Mignaton, 54, lost the use of speech. She then came out of the operating room of the neurosurgery service of the Sainte-Anne hospital in Paris. “I had five meningiomas, non -cancerous tumors, which compressed my brain. The surgeon successfully removed me the largest, the size of an orange.” Today, he still has four tumors housed in the cranial box. By dint of fierce rehabilitation, Emmanuelle has found her words. Now she refuses to be silent. It denounces omerta and lack of information on the dangers incurred by taking the Androcur.
"The neurosurgeon was formal. He said to me:" Everything you have in the head is due to your hormonal treatment. It must be stopped immediately so that the tumors stop growing. "" The Androcur marketed by the Bayer laboratory was diverted from its initial use (fight against extreme hair in women and the prostate cancer for the man) endometriosis. In 2003, Emmanuelle therefore took Androcur on the advice of the gynecologist who operated it on this disease. A treatment presented as a miracle: contraceptive, it stops pain and bleeding.
“The gynecologist knew the risks of my treatment”
For fourteen years, this mother of two boys begins her day with a glass of water and a tablet of 100 mg of Androcur , or more than 5,000 capsules in all. "I was never informed that this drug favored the development of meningiomas. However, the alerts started in 2007! In 2011, Bayer even pointed it out in a new notice. In 2013, I asked the gynecologist to remove my reproductive organs and thus free myself from this hormonal treatment which did not always work very well. He replied:" We do not change a treatment that works! " At the time, he knew the risks.
As of 2011, the financial analyst at the Banque de France encounters health problems that acted in 2015: “My brain had bugs. I was told that I had to make a pre-menopause depression. When my right leg presented weaknesses, I was found too big, not muscled enough and I was prescribed physiotherapy! In the skull, I was told that I was doing tension headache! ” One morning in August 2017, Emmanuelle's right hand paralyzed. Direction emergencies. “When I saw the MRI and the meningiomas that took a third of my head, I said to myself:" It's screwed up, the end is near. " So my eldest son turned me to the Sainte-Anne hospital in Paris, where I was saved. ”
More than 80,000 patients were informed by mail
In early retirement for disability, Emmanuelle fights for women victims of Androcur with her association Amavea, co -founded with Nathalie Grillot, another victim. They are helped by Maître Charles Joseph-Oudin, lawyer specializing in the defense of drug victims (Mediator, Dépakine, etc.). It salutes the health insurance initiative and the National Medicines Safety Agency to send a letter in July to more than 80,000 patients to whom Androcur or its generics have been prescribed, as well as to 30,000 doctors and 2,000 health establishments to warn them of the risk of "meningiomal development". A risk multiplied by seven beyond six months of treatment, and by twenty for prolonged and high doses uses. It was time to inform patients.
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