A woman from Arkansas is adding her Lipitor lawsuit to the Lipitor multidistrict litigation (MDL), alleging that the heart disease drug causes type-2 diabetes.

Plaintiff Judy K. took Lipitor from November 2002 to July 2009. In July 2006, she was diagnosed with type-2 diabetes. She now attributes her diabetes to Lipitor. She claims she has suffered both physical and emotional harm as a result of her Lipitor diabetes.

Judy raises claims common to many other Lipitor diabetes lawsuits. These include negligence, misrepresentation, strict liability for defective design and failure to warn, breach of warranty, fraud, and unjust enrichment.

As a resident of Arkansas, she is also bringing a claim for violation of the Arkansas Deceptive Trade Practice Act.

The Lipitor Diabetes MDL

Judy’s Lipitor lawsuit is one of over 2,000 such claims in a multidistrict litigation now going on in the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina under MDL no. 2502. An MDL is a consolidation of several individual lawsuits that share certain issues, as is often the case in large-scale product liability litigation.

Lipitor is one of a class of drugs called statins, or HMG CoA reductase inhibitors, used to treat high cholesterol and to lower the risk of stroke, heart attack, and other cardiac complications in persons with certain predispositions to those conditions. Lipitor has been on the market since first gaining FDA approval in 1996.

According to the master complaint in the Lipitor MDL, the plaintiffs are all women who took Lipitor under their doctors’ supervision and later developed type-2 diabetes. They are suing Pfizer Inc. and its related companies, all of whom are involved in the manufacture and distribution of Lipitor.

Generally, these plaintiffs allege that Pfizer knew Lipitor increased the risk of developing type-2 diabetes, particularly in women, but refused to add a warning about that risk to its U.S. labeling for Lipitor — even though it did add such a warning to its labeling for the European Union.

The plaintiffs say Pfizer added a warning to its Lipitor labeling in February 2012, alerting patients and doctors that “[i]ncreases in HbA1c and fasting serum glucose levels have been reported with HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors, including Lipitor.” However, to date the Lipitor label does not specifically warn about an increased risk of type-2 diabetes.

The Lipitor diabetes lawsuit master complaint cites information from the Centers for Disese Control and Prevention (CDC) stating that diabetes is the seventh most common cause of death in the United States. It can lead to a number of destructive secondary conditions such as stroke, blindness, kidney disease, and heart disease.

The plaintiffs also argue that statutes of limitation or repose should not bar their claims because of Pfizer’s concealment of critical safety information. Statutes of limitation and statutes of repose are two types of laws that bar plaintiffs from filing a lawsuits after a certain amount of time has passed since the events that gave rise to the claim.

In the Lipitor MDL, the plaintiffs say that Pfizer’s purposeful withholding of information about the risk of Lipitor diabetes prevented them from discovering the relationship between Lipitor and their type-2 diabetes sooner, causing them to delay the initiation of their Lipitor lawsuits. It would be unjust to allow Pfizer to escape liability by purposefully hiding its own culpability, they say.