Last Updated: 2006-08-03 11:00:35 -0400 (Reuters Health)

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A Los Angeles jury gave Merck & Co. Inc. another court victory on Wednesday when it found the company not responsible for the heart attack of a 71-year-old retired construction manager who had taken the withdrawn pain medicine Vioxx.

"The jury found Merck not liable," said Casey Stavropoulos, a spokeswoman for the company.

Merck has now won five of the eight Vioxx suits that have been decided in court.

The Los Angeles Superior Court case, the first Vioxx lawsuit to go to trial in California, was brought by Stewart Grossberg, who took Vioxx off and on, starting in 1999. He suffered a heart attack in 2001.

"The data do not support that intermittent use of Vioxx contributes to heart attacks," Tarek Ismail, a Merck defense lawyer from law firm Bartlit, Beck, Herman, Palenchar & Scott, said on a conference call.

Merck, which said that as of June 30 it was facing at least 14,200 lawsuits from people who claim to have been harmed by Vioxx, pulled the drug from the market in September 2004 after a study showed it doubled the risk of heart attack and stroke in those who took it for at least 18 months.

The company said it produced evidence during the trial showing that Grossberg has high cholesterol levels, atherosclerosis and a family history of cardiac problems.

"The judge allowed plaintiffs to select this case for trial. We should infer that this was one of their best and favored cases, otherwise they wouldn't have picked it," Ismail said.

Thomas Girardi, Grossberg's attorney, was not immediately available for comment.

Merck, based in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, has repeatedly insisted it will defend itself on a case-by-case basis and has so far not wavered in the face of calls for settlement talks.

Kenneth Frazier, the company's general counsel, said in a statement on Wednesday that the outcome of the Los Angeles trial validates that legal strategy.

The second federal Vioxx trial began this week in New Orleans with a 62-year-old former FBI agent who blamed Vioxx for his heart attack.

Merck is coming off a victory last month in the latest Vioxx trial in state court in New Jersey. In that case, an Atlantic City jury found that a host of other risk factors and not Vioxx caused the heart attack of a 68-year-old grandmother who had sued Merck.

The company's shares, which closed at $41.03 on the New York Stock Exchange, were slightly higher at $41.25 in after-hours trading.