Protect yourself!
Oral contraceptives protect against ovarian cancer
Olga Ivanova, Naked Science
Swedish scientists conducted a study of the health data of more than 250 thousand women and found that taking oral contraceptives protects against ovarian and endometrial cancer — the inner lining of the uterus. This effect persists even for several decades after the cessation of the use of tablets.
The work was published in the journal Cancer Research (Karlsson et al., Time-dependent effects of oral contraceptive use on breast, ovarian and endometrial cancers). Ovarian and endometrial cancers are the most common gynecological diseases. The second type of oncopathology has clearer symptoms, so it is often detected in the early stages, but ovarian cancer remains one of the deadliest types of cancer. Many people believe that oral contraceptives are quite harmful to women's health and can even provoke cancer.
However, scientists from Uppsala University (Sweden) have shown that they, on the contrary, protect against it. Experts used data from 256,661 women taken from the UK Biobank (the age of the participants ranged from 81 to 50 years). The cumulative risk of cancer development during the study period was assessed by experts using logistic regression and the Cox model.
It turned out that those women who had ever taken oral contraceptives had a much lower risk of developing ovarian and endometrial cancer than those who had never used birth control pills. Even 15 years after stopping taking the drugs, the risk of developing these cancers was about 50 percent lower than those who did not drink such pills.
Before that, however, it was assumed that taking such contraceptives was associated with an increased risk of breast cancer. Swedish scientists have studied this, too, showing that there is indeed an increase in risk, but only a slight one. In addition, the effect disappeared several years after stopping taking the drugs. Thus, the lifetime risk of developing breast cancer may not differ between those who take oral contraceptives and those who have never used them.
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