Whew!

By Marilynn Marchione
Associated Press

October 21, 2004
 


PHILADELPHIA -- The same huge federal study that led millions of women to abandon the use of hormones after menopause now provides reassurance that another hormone concoction -- the birth control pill -- is safe.


In fact, women on the pill had lower risks of heart disease and stroke and no increased risk of breast cancer, contrary to what many previous studies found.


Doctors say the type of hormones and the stage of life at which they're used may be what makes them helpful at one point and harmful at another.


The new findings are from nearly 162,000 participants in the Women's Health Initiative, the largest women's health study ever done and one of the biggest on oral contraceptives. Results were presented Wednesday at an American Society for Reproductive Medicine conference.


About 16 million American women take birth control pills. Most combine synthetic forms of estrogen and progestin.


Women taking these hormones after menopause were more likely to have heart disease and certain cancers -- a finding that prompted part of this large study to be stopped in 2002.


Previous research on oral contraceptives suggested that they, too, raised the chances of heart disease. But the new study found the opposite -- lower risk of heart attacks, strokes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure and other heart-related problems among the 67,000 women in the study who had ever taken the pill.


Overall, "there's an 8 percent risk reduction of ever having cardiovascular disease" among women who had ever taken birth control pills, said the lead researcher, Dr. Rahi Victory of Wayne State University in Detroit. "If you use oral contraceptives early on, you're probably going to be protected later in life."


Women on the pill also had a 7 percent lower risk of developing any form of cancer -- a benefit that increased with the length of use, Victory said. For example, women who took birth control pills for four years or more had a 42 percent lower risk of ovarian cancer and a 30 percent lower chance of uterine cancer.


The $625 million study was done at 40 locations around the country and funded by the National Institutes of Health.