The number people in Hawaii suffering liver damage linked to taking a dietary supplement for weight loss or muscle gain is now at 30, with the majority of cases on Oahu, state Department of Health officials said Wednesday.
There have been 21 cases reported on Oahu, seven on Hawaii island, and one each on Kauai and Maui. The earliest of the cases goes back to May.
Eleven of the 30 patients have been hospitalized, two underwent liver transplants, and one died, DOH said.
The Maui patient, 48-year-old Sonnette Marras, died Oct. 4 after taking the dietary supplement OxyELITE Pro for several weeks to lose weight she had gained during her last pregnancy, her family has said. Marras had seven children, ranging in age from 1 to 26.
According to an obituary notice released Wednesday, Marras worked as a construction laborer for Local 368 of the Laborers’ Union and also was a driver for Spedi Shuttle. She is survived by her companion, Michael Soriano; her mother, Gladys Marras; four daughters and three sons; and three brothers and three sisters.
The family declined to comment Wednesday, but before Marras died Soriano told Hawaii News Now that she was denied a liver transplant because doctors discovered a lump in her breast.
Speaking generally, Honolulu transplant surgeon Linda Wong said Wednesday that patients with active cancer do not receive organ transplants because anti-rejection medications can make cancer cells grow rapidly.
Wong said she has seen cases of liver damage and failure in the isles linked to dietary supplements before, maybe one or two a year, but that having so many in such a short time linked to a single product “seemed unusual” and was “not statistically normal.”
Other supplements that have caused people health problems over the years include but are not limited to Hydroxycut, Chinese herbs and slimming teas, Wong said.
“I think that there’s a lot of supplements that are being sold out there, and I think that people should tell physicians when they’re taking these things and they should report symptoms immediately and not wait too long before more severe symptoms happen,” she said.
Although DOH, the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control officially announced this week that OxyELITE Pro had been linked to 24 of the 30 cases of acute liver damage, the agencies still have not been able to pinpoint a precise cause for the epidemic. No cases have been reported in other states.
A spokesman for the FDA said Wednesday the agency is “working quickly to learn more” about which formulas of the weight loss and/or muscle gain supplement line were being taken by the affected patients and how a now-illegal formula of the product, which contains an ingredient known as DMAA (also known as 1,3-dimethylamylamine), was being purchased.
In the wake of the federal government shutdown that began Oct. 1, the FDA has been “doing what it can under this difficult situation to protect public health,” Assistant Commissioner for Media Affairs Steven Immergut said Wednesday in an email statement.
Immergut said that “while several hundred FDA investigators have been furloughed due to the shutdown, FDA’s exempted investigators are prioritizing their work based on public health need and are being deployed to situations like this that require immediate attention.”
State health department workers delivered notices to local retailers Tuesday asking them to voluntarily remove all formulas of the marketed “fat burner” OxyELITE Pro from their shelves while the state continues to work with its federal partners on the investigation.
The Health Department on Tuesday said the GNC location at Ala Moana Center had indicated it would not stop selling the product, but the company reversed course Wednesday.
On Tuesday, GNC told the Star-Advertiser it would “continue to sell the OxyELITE product in its stores until such time that either USPlabs (the product’s manufacturer) or the FDA recall the product.” But on Wednesday, spokesman Greg Miller amended that statement to say that while the company still believes the product is safe, “nonetheless, GNC will voluntarily remove the OxyELITE Pro product from sale in its Hawaii stores during this investigation.”
USPlabs LLC announced Tuesday that it voluntarily stopped national distribution of two of its OxyELITE Pro formulas “out of an abundance of caution” because of the Hawaii investigation. The company stopped producing a third formula that contains DMAA earlier this year after the FDA in April 2012 declared the ingredient illegal.
