New Study on Birth Control & Mortality Rate
Photocredit UCSB
A new study on birth control has been released by the British Medical Journal. Dr. Philip Hannaford of the University of Aberdeen led the study. The findings suggest that women are at lower risk of dying from any cause, if they have ever used the pill as a contraceptive method in their lifetime. As women grow older in age, the pill was found to have an added benefit of extending the lifespan among women who continued to take it.
The study followed 46,000 women over 40 years. The women who had been on birth control had a lower risk of dying from any cause. In fact, the mortality rate among women who took the pill was 12% lower than the women who had not taken the pill. “If you took a group of 100,000 women and they used the pill for a year, on average you’d have 52 fewer deaths compared to those using other forms of contraception,” Dr. Hannaford stated.
It was previously believed that women on the pill for a prolonged amount of time had a higher mortality rate than women who were not on the pill. The flaw in the research is that the newer generation of birth control pills has not studied. There’s no sufficient data available on the life expectancy rate of women on the contemporary versions of the pill.
In a quote from Dr. Hannaford to the BBC, discusses today’s pill:
“It would be wrong for me to say these results directly apply to today’s pills, today’s women, but from the few studies that have been done on the newer pills we are finding similar effects as the older pills. So one would suppose that the overall benefit from the newer pills is equally as good.”
More than 60 million women worldwide are using the birth control pill and 12 million women in the US are on the pill.
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