Strontium ranelate may cause alopecia

doi:10.1136/bmj.b1494

Published 22 April 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b1494
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;338:b1494

Practice

Drug Point

Strontium ranelate may cause alopecia

María Sainz, pharmacist, Javier García del Pozo, pharmacist, Luis H Martín Arias, clinical pharmacologist, Alfonso Carvajal, professor of pharmacology and head of institute

¹ Regional Centre of Pharmacovigilance, Castilla y León, Instituto de Farmacoepidemiología, Universidad de Valladolid, Spain

Correspondence to: A Carvajal, Instituto de Farmacoepidemiología, Facultad de Medicina, Ramón y Cajal, 7, 47005 Valladolid, Spain carvajal@ife.uva.es

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

From May 2005 to January 2008, the Spanish pharmacovigilancesystem received 56 reports in which strontium ranelate, a drugintended for the treatment of osteoporosis, was associated withdifferent adverse reactions; five of them (8.9%) were reportsof alopecia (table; figure). From the start of pharmacovigilanceactivities in Spain in 1982 up to January 2008, 102 540 reportswere collected, of which 393 (0.4%) were cases of alopecia;the corresponding reports for postmenopausal women were 39 640,of which 205 (0.5%) cases were of alopecia.

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Alopecia in case 3 (see table). This was accompanied by some features compatible with those of Stevens-Johnson syndrome; the European Medicines Agency has recently issued a warning of severe hypersensitivity syndromes, sometimes fatal, which developed in patients being treated with strontium ranelate. It cannot be ruled out that, as seems to have occurred in this case, alopecia is one of the many symptoms . . . [Full text of this article]