Celebrex from Pfizer has received the approval from federal advisers for marketing it for children suffering from devastated form of arthritis even though there was a split opinion on this issue. Celebrex is a painkiller from the stable of Pfizer. Besides this a recommendation was also made for monitoring the effect of the dug for a number of years.
Now the FDA needs to weigh the recommendations of the panel regarding approval of the drug. Though FDA is not bound to follow the advice of the expert panel but generally it does. Before this the advisory committee had given approval for the drug in treating juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.
The panel had stated that Pfizer should undertake a long term study of the safety of the drug by creation of a registry which would require it to be tracked for a period of ten to twenty years. What got the drug approval was the fact that the benefits outweighed the risks.
