An Ohio woman diagnosed with type-2 diabetes following more than two years of taking the popular cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor filed a Lipitor lawsuit against drug manufacturer Pfizer alleging product liability, fraud and negligence.

In her Lipitor lawsuit, Marsha M. of Columbus, Ohio says her doctor prescribed Lipitor in December 1996 and by 1999 she had developed type-2 diabetes.

Lipitor is the subject of thousands of lawsuits filed by plaintiffs who accuse Lipitor manufacturer Pfizer of failing to disclose information about the drug’s risks to both those in the medical community as well as consumers.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Lipitor in 1996 and its generic equivalent, atorvastatin, in 2011. It is in a class of drugs known as statins, which help lower cholesterol levels by inhibiting an enzyme that plays a central role in the production of cholesterol in the liver, which produces about 70 percent of total cholesterol in the body.

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 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.

Women reportedly face an increased risk of developing type-2 diabetes from using Lipitor while reaping fewer benefits than their male counterparts.

The study finding women to be at an increased risk prompted the FDA to require a label change, which then resulted in a flood of Lipitor lawsuits being filed across the country.

The chief complaints lobbed by the plaintiffs against Pfizer are that the drug giant did not include an adequate warning label and failed to list diabetes as a possible side effect. Many of the Lipitor lawsuits also say the 2012 label change about watching for changes in glucose levels were still “vague, unclear and uninformative.”

Due to the large number of lawsuits, a federal judicial panel consolidated all the Lipitor diabetes lawsuits into a multidistrict litigation (MDL) based in federal court in Charleston, S.C. Pfizer, which has generated in excess of $130 billion in revenue from the sales of Lipitor, opposed the Lipitor MDL, arguing it would prompt copycat filings.

Prescribed to lower cholesterol, reducing the risk of heart attack and stroke, Lipitor, along with Crestor and Zocor, is one of the top-selling drugs in the United States. According to a 2011 Harvard Health publication, half of men ages to 65 to 74 take statins and 39 percent of women ages 75 and older use them.

That equates to one in four Americans, ages 45 and older, taking a statin, a figure that comes out to 32 million people, equivalent to the entire populations of Florida and Illinois combined, according to Harvard Health.