Study: Women Who Use Birth-Control Pill Live Longer

(The Times of London) - Women who have used the birth-control Pill can expect to live longer, a large study reported in the British Medical Journal on Friday suggests.

Research involving 46,000 British women over nearly 40 years has confirmed that the Pill is not linked to long-term health risks from cancer or heart disease, The Times of London said.

While younger women are at slightly higher risk of suffering heart attack, stroke or breast and cervical cancers while taking the Pill, researchers say this effect is negligible, and outweighed by wider benefits.

Any adverse effects of the Pill disappear within ten years of stopping taking it, and could easily be counteracted by regular checks and a healthy lifestyle, they said.

Philip Hannaford, a professor at the University of Aberdeen who led the study for the Royal College of GPs, said that over a lifetime, women who took the Pill at any stage were less likely to die from any cause than those who did not.

“Our best estimate is that if you took a group of 100,000 women, and they used the pill for a year, on average you would have 52 fewer deaths in those women compared to those using other forms of contraception,” he said.

Professor Hannaford said the beneficial effects may only be true for women who have taken older-style pills - rather than those on newer drugs, which may have slightly different formulations.

But he added that the lower risks were probably not a direct result of the Pill.

“It might be that the characteristics of these women, that they are more likely to use health services, have blood checks or other monitoring means they are at reduced risk,” Prof Hannaford said.

The study, organized by the Royal College of GPs, began in 1968 when 23,000 women who used oral contraceptives for an average of four years, and a similar number who didn’t, were recruited from 1,400 surgeries across Britain.

Source: The Times of London