The Oral Contraceptive Has Prevented 200,000 Cases of Cancer, Study
Research shows that oral contraceptives have prevented 200,000 cases of endometrial cancer in the last ten years, according to time.
Published in The Lancet Oncology, the study had UK researchers looking at 27,276 women with endometrial (uterine) cancer and 115,743 women without it from 36 different studies. They found that 400,000 cases of endometrial cancer were prevented when women took the pills for 50 years, and 200,000 of these prevented cases were from the past decade.
Just about 10 to 15 years of use of the pill halves the lifetime risk of endometrial cancer, study author Prof. Valerie Beral from the University of Oxford in the U.K. and her co-authors said, according to cbc.
"Women who are alive now in the West, a large proportion have taken the pill," Beral said in an interview. "We've got very reliable data. As far as cancer is concerned, they're better off if they've taken the pill."
Moreover, with five years of using oral contraceptives, the risk of endometrial cancer comes down by a quarter. "Hormone doses in oral contraceptives have dropped through the years, but the new findings suggest that the amount of hormones in lower dose pills used today still offer a protective benefit," says Time.
The effect of oral contraceptives is to make the body believe in its own pregnancy, thus lowering the flow of natural estrogen in the body, and lowering the risk of developing endometrial cancer.
With long years of consumption, the risk comes down further. It is more significant that even after they stopped the pill, the risk reduced for over 30 years, which suggested that the protection had been prolonged.
"That means women who are taking the pill in their 20s and 30s are protected right through to the age when they are at greatest risk of developing endometrium cancer, which is 55 or older," said Associate Professor Karen Canfell, the director of cancer research at Cancer Council NSW and a member of the international collaborative group that produced the research. "It's a really important result, and it's a really reassuring result," according to smh.
