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Arizona man says bum Theranos blood tests led to heart attack, files lawsuit

Tests, now voided by company, showed normal results weeks prior to attack.

Arizona man says bum Theranos blood tests led to heart attack, files lawsuit

There’s yet another unhappy Theranos customer.

In a lawsuit filed Monday in the US District Court in Arizona, an ex-customer alleges that bum blood tests performed by the beleaguered biotech company directly led to him having a heart attack. (A PDF of the lawsuit is available here.) The test results were later voided by the company, independent of any involvement from the plaintiff, identified only as R.C. in the lawsuit.

R.C. joins at least nine other ex-customers suing the company over faulty tests and the company’s lofty but unfulfilled claims. Each lawsuit is seeking class-action status.

R.C.’s blood tests, which were intended to accurately survey his blood’s lipid and sugar levels, were ordered by his doctor as part of routine heart monitoring. The Theranos test results came back normal, effectively giving R.C. an “all clear.” This led R.C.’s doctor to recommend that he stick with his current medication regimen to maintain his healthy status, the lawsuit claims. But less than a month later, R.C. suffered a heart attack, leading to a hospitalization during which doctors had to implant two stents into R.C.’s arteries.

It was then that R.C. and his doctor began to seriously question the Theranos test results, the lawsuit explains.

“Additional blood work performed during his hospitalization strongly suggested that the near-contemporaneous Theranos blood test was inaccurate and that R.C. and his cardiologist’s reliance on the Theranos’ test results was potentially inaccurate or even harmful,” the lawsuit states. Their doubts solidified when Theranos later voided the results as it voided or corrected tens of thousands of other results. The massive sweep by the company was an attempt to appease concerned federal regulators, who have since imposed heavy sanctions against the company for its shoddy lab practices and tests.

In light of the voided results, R.C. is seeking class-action status for the lawsuit, as well as costs, restitution and punitive damages in an amount that will be determined at trial.

While R.C. is certainly not the first to file suit against Theranos, which is facing extensive legal and regulatory troubles, the lawsuit is one of the first to provide a clear example of how the faulty tests may have directly put patients in harm’s way. In several of the other lawsuits, plaintiffs complain of being duped into using the company’s services, having to reorder tests, and being inconvenienced or distressed by erroneous results.

One common thread throughout the lawsuits, however, is an apparent bait-and-switch in the customer experience. Many of the plaintiff’s say there were drawn to using Theranos’ blood tests because the company touted that it only required a few drops of blood from a quick and painless finger prick rather than large, venous blood draws. Central to this claim is the company’s proprietary blood testing devices, Edison machines, which media and regulatory reports have since described as being inaccurate and unreliable.

In the lawsuits, ex-customers repeatedly complained that once they arrived in the clinic, those effortless finger pricks turned into torturous ordeals or were ditched all together for traditional venous blood draws. In the new lawsuit, R.C. reported that “the phlebotomist struggled to secure enough blood from R.C.’s finger and had to repeat the painful process several times before collecting enough to test.”

Since the experience, R.C. and all of the other ex-customers have switched back to standard blood testing services.

Theranos, meanwhile, is still reeling from federal sanctions that stand to shut down their remaining blood testing operations and ban its CEO and founder, Elizabeth Holmes, from the medical testing business for at least two years. While the company has shut down testing at its California lab, operations continue at its Arizona blood testing facility. The sanctions that stand to close the lab are currently set to take effect September 5.

Channel Ars Technica