A California woman added her Lipitor lawsuit to hundreds of other such claims filed in the Lipitor multidistrict litigation.

Plaintiff Beverly F. says she took Lipitor from 2003 to 2015. She says she was diagnosed with type-2 diabetes in November 2013. She now attributes her development of diabetes to the Lipitor she took for so many years.

The Lipitor Diabetes MDL

Beverly’s Lipitor lawsuit is part of a multidistrict litigation, or MDL, that is going on now in a South Carolina federal court. This MDL is a consolidation of several hundred Lipitor lawsuits alleging a link between Lipitor and development of diabetes in women.

Federal courts use the MDL system to coordinate pretrial proceedings in cases in which many individual claims raise similar allegations, as they do in products liability cases like this one.

Lipitor is one drug in a class of medications known as statins, which are used to lower cholesterol in patients who have not been able to lower it via diet and exercise.

Since Lipitor was first approved by the FDA in 1996, Lipitor sales have reached over $120 billion dollars. Today, even with competition from generic versions, Lipitor sales rake in over $2 billion per year for manufacturer Pfizer Inc.

According to the MDL’s master long form complaint, Lipitor causes an increase in the risk of developing type-2 diabetes, particularly in women. The plaintiffs in the MDL are generally women who developed diabetes after taking a course of Lipitor. Some other plaintiffs are spouses or relatives of women who allegedly developed Lipitor diabetes, bringing their own claims for loss of consortium or wrongful death.

The plaintiffs allege their type-2 diabetes is directly attributable to the Lipitor they took to lower their cholesterol. They now say that their Lipitor diabetes puts them at risk for developing any of the many destructive complications of diabetes, such as “heart disease, blindness, neuropathy or kidney disease.”

The plaintiffs say that Pfizer failed to fully evaluate the safety of Lipitor before introducing it to the market. They also say that Pfizer has failed to adequately warn doctors and patients about the risks of Lipitor diabetes. They say that if the defendants had properly disclosed that risk the plaintiffs would have avoided taking Lipitor and would not have developed diabetes.

In February 2012, at the request of the FDA, the defendants added a warning to the Lipitor label stating that Lipitor had been associated with “[i]ncreases in HbA1c and fasting serum glucose levels.” But to date, the Lipitor label does not adequately warn patients about the increase risk of type-2 diabetes, the plaintiffs say.

The short form complaint for the MDL offers plaintiffs the options of bringing claims based on theories of negligence, misrepresentation, defective design, failure to warn, breach of warranty, fraud, and unjust enrichment. Plaintiffs also have the option of adding other claims as the facts of their case require, such as claims under various states’ consumer protection laws.

The Lipitor Diabetes Lawsuit is Case No. 2:15-CV-04572, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina as part of the Lipitor MDL, MDL 2502.

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