Statement from FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, M.D., on new steps to strengthen the long-term safety oversight of the Essure device following discontinuation of its U.S. sales

FDA Statement

• For Immediate Release: December 20, 2018

When new safety concerns arise for particular devices, we’re committed to taking action to develop post-market information that can help patients and providers make more informed decisions and also support regulatory actions that reduce any potential risks to patients. We’ve taken a series of such steps with respect to Essure, a permanent birth control device. The product has been the focus of several important FDA safety actions. We’re announcing some additional steps today to make sure the FDA continues to evaluate the product’s long-term safety profile past its scheduled discontinuation from the U.S. market following a series of earlier regulatory actions that we took apply significant new requirements on its use. This includes the agency’s decision to take the step of making Essure a restricted device.

In July, citing the declining annual number of implantations, the manufacturer of the device, Bayer, announced that Essure will no longer be sold or distributed in the U.S. after Dec. 31, 2018. At that time, I stressed that, even when Essure is no longer sold, the FDA would remain vigilant in its oversight of the device. This includes requiring that Bayer complete the postmarket surveillance study that we ordered in February 2016. I also affirmed that we’d continue to actively communicate with patients and physicians as new information about the device becomes available or as the FDA takes additional regulatory steps.

Today, I’m providing an update on new steps to revise and strengthen the manufacturer’s postmarket study, to make sure we continue to collect long-term safety information following the discontinuation of the product to better evaluate the safety profile of the device when used in the real world.

As part of the revised protocol for the postmarket surveillance study, the FDA has worked with Bayer to see that the manufacturer implements several approved modifications to the study that we believe will strengthen the evidence collected.

First and foremost, women in the study will be followed for five years, rather than the three years that was initially required. This significant extension follows the FDA’s request that the company go beyond the three-year period provided for by law. This extension will provide us with longer-term information on adverse risks of the device, including issues that may lead women to have the device removed.

Second, we’re requiring additional blood testing of patients enrolled in follow-up visits during the study to learn more about patients’ levels of certain inflammatory markers that can be indicators of increased inflammation. This could help us better evaluate potential immune reactions to the device and whether these findings are associated with symptoms that patients have reported related to Essure.

The FDA is also requiring Bayer to continue to enroll patients who might still opt to receive Essure in advance of its full discontinuation from the U.S. market, and to continue to submit more frequent reports to the FDA on the study’s progress and results. Since FDA’s 2016 decision to order Bayer to conduct the postmarket study and then to add a boxed warning and Patient Decision Checklist to the labeling, sales of Essure declined by 70 percent. Earlier this year, the FDA decided to restrict the sale and distribution of the device to only health care providers and facilities that provide information to patients about the risks and benefits of this device and that give patients the opportunity to sign an acknowledgement of understanding before implantation. In view of this decline in sales and the manufacturer’s decision to discontinue sales and distribution at the end of this year, we recognize that Bayer is having challenges reaching the study’s initial sample size that relied on enrolling patients who were newly implanted with Essure until May 2020. We believe that this new, revised study plan will help provide more long-term information regarding complications that may be experienced by patients who have Essure, despite reduced enrollment.

For the past several years, the FDA has been monitoring the progress of an Essure post-approval study that was mandated to gather long-term data on pregnancies occurring in patients who may have received a transvaginal ultrasound in order to confirm that Essure was properly placed in a woman’s fallopian tubes and could be relied upon to prevent pregnancy. The FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health conducted an  analysis of an ongoing post-approval study data to gain a fuller understanding of device removals over time; they also completed their extensive evaluation into a significant collection of medical device reports submitted in 2017 and the first half of 2018 that mentioned issues involving potential device removal to learn more about why women were choosing to have the device removed, which usually requires a surgical procedure. CDRH also spent the past several months actively evaluating more than 15,000 medical device reports submitted to FDA in 2017 through June 2018 on the Essure device. (The majority of these reports referenced an instance in which the device was removed from a patient, and most came from cases that were made available by plaintiff attorneys as part of litigation against the manufacturer Bayer.) CDRH is providing some important new information about the removals of the Essure device learned from this analysis on our website.

Based on this information, the FDA instructed Bayer to extend the postmarket surveillance study from three years to five years to capture longer term information about device removals. We believe it’s important to continue closely monitoring device removals in the postmarket surveillance study to gain greater knowledge of this issue.

Following Essure’s removal from the market, the FDA is committed to continuing to monitor women who have the device implanted. In addition to the post-market surveillance study, the agency will continue its efforts to monitor Essure’s safety and effectiveness since its approval in 2002 by reviewing the medical literature, clinical trial information, post-approval study data and medical device reports submitted to the agency. This follows previous actions the FDA has taken, including requiring Bayer to add a boxed warning to the labeling of Essure and issue a Patient Decision Checklist to help women considering Essure to be fully informed about potential risks and the sales restriction that FDA placed on the product.

I personally had the opportunity to meet with women who have been adversely affected by Essure to listen and learn about their concerns. Some of the women I spoke with developed significant medical problems that they ascribe to their use of the product. We remain committed to these women and to improving how we monitor the safety of medical devices, including those related to women’s health.

We’re also advancing new ways to solidify our monitoring systems to achieve our new goal to consistently be the first among the world’s regulatory agencies to identify and act upon safety signals related to medical devices.

As we announced when we issued our Medical Device Safety Action Plan in April, we’re working to implement an active surveillance system to help us detect device safety signals faster, including for devices related to women’s health. We’re implementing active surveillance capabilities as part of our National Evaluation System of health Technology, which will leverage a wide range of data systems that could provide real-time information on device safety signals from electronic health information, such as registries and electronic medical records. We’re also continuing our ongoing efforts to strengthen our Coordinated Registry Networks (CRN), which link different real-world data sources to generate clinical evidence about medical devices used by patients.
 
We’re especially focused on addressing clinical questions for device therapies that address conditions that are unique to women, such as treatment of uterine fibroids, pelvic floor disorders, female sterilization (including the Essure device) and long-acting reversible contraception. To advance these goals, the FDA partnered with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Urogynecologic Society, the National Library of Medicine and others on this effort, which is known as the Women’s Health Technologies CRN, or WHT-CRN. Once fully implemented, the WHT-CRN can be used to answer crucial questions on medical devices for women’s health to help supplement the evidence we’re gathering from postmarket studies and medical device reports. It could also help us detect safety issues with medical devices faster, enabling us to take actions — like the implementation of special controls — sooner.

We believe women who’ve been using Essure successfully to prevent pregnancy can and should continue to do so. Women who suspect the device may be related to symptoms they are experiencing, such as persistent pain, should talk to their doctor on what steps may be appropriate. Device removal has its own risks. Patients should discuss the benefits and risks of any procedure with their health care providers before deciding on the best option for them. The FDA will continue to collect and review reports of adverse events associated with device removal and is committed to continuing to provide updates on our evaluation of this data as the information is collected and we develop new findings about the device.

Medical device safety is a high priority for the FDA and we’re focused on protecting patients’ health by taking appropriate action when necessary, while also keeping the public informed of new risks.

The FDA, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, protects the public health by assuring the safety, effectiveness, and security of human and veterinary drugs, vaccines and other biological products for human use, and medical devices. The agency also is responsible for the safety and security of our nation’s food supply, cosmetics, dietary supplements, products that give off electronic radiation, and for regulating tobacco products.