A North Carolina woman has joined the thousands of plaintiffs across the country who have sued pharmaceutical giant Pfizer over its widely popular cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor.

Kathleen J., 62, alleges product liability, fraud, misrepresentation, a failure to warn and a host of other counts related to the medication, which Kathleen says resulted in her getting Lipitor diabetes. She was diagnosed with type-2 diabetes in August 2007.

Kathleen took the statin from 2001 to 2005 and again between 2007 and 2009, according to her Lipitor diabetes lawsuit.

Kathleen has suffered “severe and permanent physical and emotional injuries including, but not limited to, the development of Type 2 Diabetes as a result of her ingestion” of Lipitor, according to her Lipitor diabetes lawsuit.

Thousands of others have also filed Lipitor lawsuits against Pfizer for an alleged failure to disclose information about the drug’s risks to both healthcare workers and consumers. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted approval to Lipitor in 1996, while its generic equivalent, atorvastatin, received FDA approval in 2011.

The controversial drug has generated in excess of $130 billion in revenue for Pfizer but has been plagued by safety label changes mandated by the FDA as well as different studies linking it to health risks.

In 2012, the FDA ordered safety label changes for statins that included alerting consumers of the need for routine monitoring of liver enzymes, information about non-serious cognitive side effects such as memory loss or confusion, reports of increased blood sugar levels, and drug interactions. The new regulations came on the heels of a published study that found women using the medication may be at an increased risk of developing type-2 diabetes. Many of the plaintiffs filing Lipitor lawsuits were diagnosed with diabetes despite living healthy lifestyles.

After the study’s results were published, and the FDA responded with a required label change, Lipitor diabetes lawsuits poured in across the country. The complaints accused Pfizer of liability for alleged inadequate warning labels that failed to list diabetes as a possible Lipitor side effect. Many of the Lipitor lawsuits also asserted that the 2012 label change about watching for changes in glucose levels were still “vague, unclear and uninformative.”

Reuters reported in August that since March, federal court filings by U.S. women who allege that Lipitor caused them to get type-2 diabetes have shot up from 56 to almost 1,000.

Researchers in a British study published in September 2014 that looked at more than 200,000 people in 43 genetic studies found that statins increase the risk of type-2 diabetes.

A study published in the 2012 Archives of Internal Medicine also identified a nexus between women ages 50 to 79 who took a statin such as Lipitor, Crestor and Zocor, and an increased risk for developing the disease. After that study, the FDA required Pfizer to include the increased risk for diabetes on its warning label for Lipitor.

Millions of women have been prescribed Lipitor to help lower cholesterol and the risk for heart attack and stroke.