Pfizer is facing a new Lipitor lawsuit, which has joined others in the litigation alleging that the heart disease drug can cause women to develop diabetes while using the medication.

Plaintiff Geri Love began taking Lipitor in February 2007 and continued with this treatment until December of 2011. The Lipitor type-2 diabetes lawsuit asserts that Love took the drug under her physician’s guidance and in accordance with the manufacturer’s guidelines, in order to reduce her chances of developing heart disease.

Her Lipitor lawsuit states that despite a healthy lifestyle and diet, Love’s physicians diagnosed her with type-2 diabetes in June 2011. She claims in her Lipitor lawsuit that she developed type-2 diabetes from the drug, that the manufacturers were aware of this risk, and that they marketed Lipitor anyway.

Love’s Lipitor lawsuit is far from the first to make these allegations. Pfizer is currently facing thousands of Lipitor lawsuits alleging that the drug can cause women to develop type-2 diabetes.

Lipitor belongs to a class of drugs called statins. Statins can help lower blood cholesterol levels. High levels of cholesterol in the blood, particularly HDL cholesterol, can dramatically increase a person’s risk of developing heart disease. Additionally, diet and lifestyle are only part of the equation as the body does produce cholesterol on its own. Statins like Lipitor can help prevent the body from producing excess cholesterol, reducing the risk of developing heart disease.

Unfortunately, a number of studies suggest, and Lipitor lawsuits like Love’s allege, that statins can increase the risk of developing type-2 diabetes in women only. To back this assertion, Love’s Lipitor lawsuit — and similar lawsuits — cite studies that have found a link between the drug and type-2 diabetes.

The Lipitor lawsuits further allege that drug makers deliberately concealed the risk of diabetes associated with the drug. To back this assertion, the Lipitor lawsuit cites the fact that in 2011, when Pfizer was ordered to include information on the risk of diabetes by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), that the company included what Love alleges is a jargon-cloaked version that never actually uses the word “diabetes.”

The Lipitor diabetes litigation has taken the form of a multidistrict litigation  (MDL) or mass tort. MDLs are a sort of group litigation, similar to a class action lawsuit in some ways. In both class action lawsuits and MDLs, a group of plaintiffs allege that they have suffered similar harm at the hands of the same defendant. The main difference is that class action lawsuits start out as group lawsuits, while MDLs start out as individual lawsuits that are later combined into a coordinated litigation.

This makes MDLs more common in drug lawsuits, since individuals from drug lawsuits tend to have injuries that vary. This makes them unlikely to coordinate a class action lawsuit from the beginning, but likely to file individual lawsuits similar enough to be combined into a single MDL. Group lawsuits like MDLs and class action lawsuits are designed to help streamline the legal process by combining tens, hundreds, or even thousands of potential individual lawsuits into single coordinated legal processes.

The Lipitor Lawsuit is Geri Love v. Pfizer Inc., Case No. 1:14-cv-01149-UA, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. It joins others in the MDL In re: Lipitor (Atorvastatin Calcium) Marketing, Sales Practices and Products Liability Litigation (No. II), MDL No. 2502, in the U.S. District Court of for the District of South Carolina.