Hydroxycut Case from Soldier With Health Problems

Case study: A soldier suffers health problems after using Hydroxycut

Robert Tropea is a plaintiff in a planned lawsuit against maker Iovate Health Sciences Inc.
By Melissa Healy melissa.healy@latimes.com
May 25, 2009

Early this month, Robert Tropea was at his new job at the cash register of an Army PX when his former sergeant rushed in to deliver some news: Hydroxycut, the weight-loss supplement Tropea had taken for three months in 2007, had been recalled from the market. The FDA had linked the product to a string of illnesses, including liver damage, seizures, abnormal heart function and a condition called rhabdomyolysis.

Tropea says he was "completely shocked": How could an herbal supplement he took to trim down do all that? At least, he thought, it offered an explanation for the mysterious turn in his health and fortune.

A former Army radio operator stationed in Stuttgart, Germany, the 27-year-old had been medically discharged from the service just six months before. After a physical-training session with his sergeant in July 2007, Tropea's arm and shoulder muscles ached as they never had before. His urine was black. At the hospital, a blood test showed his creatine kinase levels -- a test for organ and muscle damage -- were 3,000 times the normal limit.

Doctors diagnosed rhabdomyolysis, an acute breakdown of muscle tissue that can damage the liver and kidneys and, in severe cases, cause sudden death. Because rhabdomyolysis is most often the result of crush injuries, heat stroke, alcoholism or drug use, doctors thought it was unusual to see the condition in a fit, active-duty serviceman who, according to his military records, drank alcohol very rarely, had regularly passed drug tests, and had no recent history of trauma. Fearing a potentially disastrous recurrence, Tropea's physicians have warned against physical exertion of any kind.

He used to bench press hundreds of pounds and could do push-ups with one arm. Now, says Tropea, he has trouble picking up his 3-year-old daughter and worries that he won't be able to coach her soccer team one day. His Army career -- from which he had planned to retire as an officer after completing his college degree -- is over.

Hydroxycut, Tropea believes, has left his health -- and his future -- uncertain. Tropea, who still lives in Stuttgart, is among the first wave of plaintiffs in a planned lawsuit against Iovate Health Sciences Inc., the maker of Hydroxycut.

"I thought of it as a supplement to help burn fat and increase energy -- no different than a vitamin to help me with exercise," says Tropea of the Hydroxycut Hardcore supplement he took. "I had read the label, looked at some of the ingredients. Quite a bit of it, I didn't know what it was. But they were selling it as something safe, and I took what they said and ran with it." Iovate refused to discuss Tropea's experience. "We have not seen the complaint and therefore cannot comment on it," said company spokeswoman Jamie Moss.

Like 59% of Americans polled by the Harris Poll in 2002, Tropea believed a government agency such as the FDA assured the safety of dietary supplements before they could be sold to the public. It is a belief that is only partially true.

Tropea had not even thought to inform his doctors that he had been taking Hydroxycut steadily for the three months leading up to his hospitalization, in an effort to boost his fitness level and get down to the weight limits set for active-duty soldiers. The only medication he had ever taken was Ibuprofen. And Hydroxycut, he reasoned, wasn't medication.

That's where Tropea was wrong.

"Dietary supplements are typically derived from plants and minerals, and they certainly can have effects on the body" as powerful as the effects that drugs can have, says David B. Allison, director of the University of Alabama at Birmingham's Clinical Nutrition Research Center and an expert on the safety of dietary supplements.

"This idea that dietary supplements are all natural is nice. But they're really no different than many drugs which are traditionally derived from minerals or extracts of plants or animals. And everything we do and take has side effects."