While the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is told to have its set of doubts over the safety of the popular anti-clotting drug Plavix, a recent report seems to have raised questions on the FDA analysis. It has been known that the drug is known to be taken by patients at risk of heart attacks and strokes to prevent blood clots, but the report released by the FDA last year had casted doubt on the genetic test.

The study is told to have come after reviewing 32 published studies involving some 42,000 patients. The drug Plavix, or clopidogrel, is told to have $6.7 billion in global sales last year and is being taken by some 40 million patients, thereby making the drug as the second-biggest selling drug after the statin Lipitor.

It has been told earlier that patients having a certain variant of a gene that makes the CYP2C19 enzyme have been reported to have not being getting proper results and that is what has made patients worry about the drug.

This is what even made the FDA lashed out against the drug in March 2010, thereby making it clear to those who taking the drug and those recommending it that it can result in potentially adverse consequences. The primary author of the study and a researcher in the genetic epidemiology department at University College London, Michael Holmes, is of the say that patients with that the gene variant didn't have a substantially higher rate of heart attacks and other cardiac events.

Despite four randomized controlled trials, there could not be any significant evidence found defining link between the gene variant and subsequent cardiac events. “This study identified no clinically significant interaction of CYP2C19 genotype with the association of clopidogrel therapy and cardiovascular events”, said the team.

As the variant is told to be present in nearly 30% of the US population, there could be dire consequences in store of them if significant attention is not being paid to the underlying theory presented by the FDA.