Dr. Alexandra MacKillop discusses long-term health risks of hormonal birth control that doctors often don't mention: stroke, fertility problems from androgen rebound, and elevated cancer risk including breast, ovarian, and endometrial cancers. She argues patients would make different choices if informed of these risks earlier.
A friend of mine's sister had a stroke because of use of the birth control pill. And a lot of times those risks are pooh poohed. As you know, it's only a problem if you're already unhealthy. Well, it's not true. And maybe you were unhealthy and that's why you were led to take the birth control pill as a treatment, but you didn't know what was causing those things. But then long term, there can be implications for fertility if you're one of those unlucky people who comes off the pill and your own androgen levels rebound high. Androgens are one of the number one causes of infertility in women. And now you're leading down the infertility sequela of. I'm going to go through IVF or IUI and then ivf. And now it's taken another five years and I haven't figured it out. And now I need an egg donor as an example. Right. Things that you maybe didn't account for in the early stages, cancer risks. Not just breast cancer, not just ovarian cancer, not just endometrial cancer, but colon cancer. The Depo Provera shot has actually been found to increase risk of meningiomas, which is a type of brain cancer, which is again, not something most people account for when they're thinking, hey, I want to have this short term effect, perhaps for contraception, or maybe their doctor never talked to them about it. And I think that's probably the bigger problem because most of us, again, to your point, if, if we knew at the time, we might have chosen differently in the context of our values and our goals, but we didn't know because nobody told us.
