Following Suit: Lipitor Lawsuit Updates

Philadelphia, PABy August 15, 2014, court records show that 1,162 Lipitor claims have been filed against Pfizer Inc., the manufacturer of the “best-selling prescription drug of all time.” The Lipitor lawsuits filed by plaintiffs who developed Type 2 diabetes allege that Pfizer failed to adequately warn patients and their doctors about the cholesterol medication’s association with diabetes and other risks associated with Lipitor.

Lipitor lawsuits on the rise

This number of claims is up from 959 diabetes lawsuits filed by July 2014 (In re Lipitor [Atorvastatin] Litigation, MDL No. 2502). Lipitor attorneys believe this increase in claims - only 56 lawsuits were filed five months ago - is due to a Reuters analysis that reported all federally filed Lipitor lawsuits have recently been consolidated in one federal district court in South Carolina. One Lipitor attorney says those claims represent about 4,000 women injured by Lipitor.

As well, Reuters notes that the Lipitor litigation began to spike after the FDA required Pfizer and other statin manufacturers to update their medication labels indicating a possible association with Type 2 diabetes. (The FDA warning was issued in February 2012 regarding the potential for Lipitor to cause new-onset diabetes in women, but at the same time, the agency also says in its consumer report that the benefits of statins are “indisputable.”)

According to court records, a Louisiana woman who filed a Lipitor lawsuit in the MDL claims that she was healthy in 2006, before she was prescribed Lipitor to lower her cholesterol levels. By early 2013, she was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes (2:14-cv-02251-PD, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia).

Lipitor lawsuits that are currently pending in the District of South Carolina claim that Pfizer knew of the potential association between the statin and diabetes before changing the drug’s label in February 2012 as per the FDA request, but concealed this information so its market share would be protected. Additionally, the Lipitor claims say that diabetes information added to the label in 2012 is still inadequate.

Reuters said the first Lipitor trial is scheduled to begin in July 2015. Pfizer stated that they are not guilty of the charges and will defend themselves in court.

Lipitor diabetes study

BMJ (the British Medical Journal) published a statins study (May 29, 2014) suggesting that patients may have an increased risk for developing new-onset Type 2 diabetes after taking high doses of Lipitor and similar statins. After evaluating almost 137,000 participants from the US, Canada and the UK who were prescribed a statin after being hospitalized for a stroke, heart attack or other cardiovascular problem, researchers concluded that:

“Higher potency statin use is associated with a moderate increase in the risk of new onset diabetes compared with lower potency statins in patients treated for secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease. Clinicians should consider this risk when prescribing higher potency statins in secondary prevention patients.”

Further, the study results indicated the risk increase seemed to be the highest in the first four months of patients’ use of the statins.

More than 29 million patients in the US alone have taken Lipitor and global sales have soared to more than $130 billion since it was FDA-approved in 1996.