A Kentucky woman filed a Lipitor lawsuit and joined the mass legal action against Pfizer, alleging that the heart disease drug can cause type-2 diabetes, particularly in older women.

Plaintiff Jeannine Roy explained in her Lipitor lawsuit that she began taking the drug in July 1998 and continued taking it on and off through 2007, under the direction of her physicians. In 2002, she received a diagnosis of type-2 diabetes, which her Lipitor lawsuit claims was caused by the heart disease medication.

Thousands of women have filed similar Lipitor lawsuits, alleging that the cholesterol drug can increase the risk of developing type-2 diabetes in post-menopausal women. These various Lipitor lawsuits have cited epidemiological studies and postmarket surveillance suggesting that the drug increases the risk of developing type-2 diabetes.

Type-2 diabetes is a metabolic disorder wherein the body loses its ability to regulate the amount of glucose (sugar) in the blood. This can cause a constellation of serious complications, including kidney failure, heart disease, and even gangrene as tissue dies in the limbs. There is no cure for diabetes, and the condition has to be carefully managed to avoid these complications.

In addition to the allegation that Pfizer was aware, or should have been aware, of the risk of diabetes from Lipitor, other Lipitor diabetes lawsuits like Roy’s allege that the makers of the drug deliberately downplayed the risk.

One piece of evidence that has come up in many of the Lipitor lawsuits is that when the FDA demanded changes to the drug’s label to reflect the risk of type-2 diabetes, Pfizer used medical jargon about “increased blood glucose levels” and never actually used the word “diabetes” in the drug’s safety information.

The thousands of Lipitor diabetes lawsuits like Roy’s have been consolidated into multidistrict litigation (MDL), also known as a mass tort. MDLs are a sort of group legal action similar to a class action lawsuit.

In both class action lawsuits and MDLs, a large number of plaintiffs allege that they have suffered similar harm at the hands of the same defendant under similar circumstances. The main difference is that class action suits are launched as group lawsuits, while MDLs start out as very similar individual lawsuits which are later coordinated into a single MDL.

MDLs are much more common in drug lawsuits, like the Lipitor MDL, since individuals in drug lawsuits tend to have injuries that vary.

The Lipitor Lawsuit is Jeannine Roy v. Pfizer Inc., Civil Action No. 2:14-cv-3142-RMG, in the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina, Charleston Division. The Lipitor MDL is In re: Lipitor (Atorvastatin Calcium) Marketing, Sales Practices and Products Liability Litigation (No. II), MDL No. 2502, U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina.