As per a 334-page bipartisan report released by the Senate Finance committee on Saturday, drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline’s Avandia diabetes drug is associated with countless cases of heart attack – and the company, aware of the drug’s heart attack risks, has been keeping the information under wraps.

Developed over the last couple of years, the report by the committee investigators – including Max Baucus (D., Mont.), and Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) – has largely been based on a review of over 250,000 pages of documents provided by GlaxoSmithKline, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and a number of research institutes.

Commenting on the findings and noting that the FDA had overlooked Avandia’s safety concerns found by its staff, Baucus said: “Americans have a right to know there are serious health risks associated with Avandia and GlaxoSmithKline had a responsibility to tell them. Patients trust drug companies with their health and their lives and GlaxoSmithKline abused that trust.”

Meanwhile, GlaxoSmithKline rebuffed the report’s allegation that Avandia is an unsafe drug. Noting that as many as seven clinical trials on the drug confirmed that it is associated with heart attack risk, the drugmaker’s spokeswoman Nancy Pekarek told CNN that the FDA had reviewed the data pertaining to the trials and had duly approved it as a diabetes treatment.

(With Inputs from Rupinder Kaur and Agencies)