Contraceptive pills might impair fear-regulating regions in women's brains
blog.frontiersin.org
blog.frontiersin.org
I would expect the study to compare it to other women not using OCs. Does this methodology make some sense that I'm missing?
> Methods: We recruited healthy adults aged 23-35 who identified as women currently using (n = 62) or having used (n = 37) solely combined OCs, women who never used any hormonal contraceptives (n = 40), or men (n = 41).
> Results: Compared to men, all three groups of women exhibited a larger GMV of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, while only current users showed a thinner ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Irrespective of the menstrual cycle phase, never users exhibited a thicker right anterior insular cortex than past users.
(Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fendo.2023.1228...)
I agree with you it’s somewhat confusing why they use men as their benchmark. But really this isn’t my field of expertise.
What a weird thing to say if you study the effect of the pill on women.
> who identified as women currently using
It's who identified themselves as using or not using contraceptives, not just identifying as women.
Thank god it's not.
Changes in thickness have been found even when comparing people scanned in the morning and in the evening [1]. Any drug intervention could be expected to cause physiological changes that could act as confounds. Also, in the discussion one reads: "Interestingly, no lasting effects of combined oral contraceptives (COCs) use were detected when comparing the four groups." This suggests that the changes could be driven by physiological changes instead of permanent changes in brain circuitry.
It would be great to see a follow up study controlling for potential confounding effects (for example, measuring baseline perfusion, blood pressure and controlling for time of day effects and usage of other drugs), and expanding the study with functional tests that involve fear regulation.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381191...
What are the socio-political effects of mass psychological changes brought about by putting a large chunk of the population on medications without full knowledge of the side effects?
Imagine putting an equally large percentage of the population on androgenic medications.
Not really a question big pharma is interested in discussing ...
> equally large percentage of the population on androgenic medications
Its funny you say this because doing this would actually put humanity back to the testosterone levels men had for most of human history.
Women and men respond differently to testosterone, so this argument does not hold.
But there is? Thousands of years of evolution is actually a pretty high bar to pass.
As for modern therapies, I mean - depends? A lot of our modern illnesses also simply didn’t exist at the scale they do now.
Heart disease has been going up steadily in the past few centuries for example.
ADHD is an interesting one too. I have ADHD. For the vast majority of human history it probably won’t have been a big deal for my mental health, but it is now due to what’s expected of me.
Imagine what would happen if people start routinely living to 150.
I assume you were talking more about physical risk taking though, because as "tomorrow you may die" becomes less and less likely, you're perhaps that much less incentivized to "live for today" (to deconstruct the popular boomer adage). This angle I'd take less issue with.
(Although technically a vasectomy is reversible, it isn’t guaranteed and so a vasectomy is not a good option if you intend to have children someday)
So, given you're in a stable relationship, you essential trade X years of care-free sex (until menopause) for a slight risk that it fucks you up pretty badly. In other words: the potential upside is limited, the potential downside is quite severe.
Regarding reversibility: Not as easy. It's a sophisticated operation which requires a specialist and takes 2-3 hours. If your body produces more sperm than it can absorb, they might rupture tiny tubes in your epididymis, which makes it almost impossible to reverse. The risk is higher the longer ago the vasectomy was.
Potential complications from use. Have heard some horror stories with regards to IUD failure (and resulting pregnancy) and uterus perforation, so it is not such a small risk as to by hypothetical.
It's my understanding that with birth control pills, a woman can indefinitely delay her menstrual cycle. I can absolutely see some making a choice to not have periods at all, if the other side effects for them are negligible. An option that not only brings periods back but makes them messier would not look very attractive in comparison.
As with most things health and lifestyle, everything involves tradeoffs, and choices are dependent on individual valuation of those tradeoffs.
Aren't they meant to be extremely painful to insert/remove?
Have you ever experienced recurring or ongoing debilitating pain? Going from 1-2 days of pain per month to more doesn't sound like "no side effects".
IUDs can cause side-effects especially the first few cycles after insertion.
The best birth control method (as defined by least side effects and max efficacy) I’ve come across is cycle tracking / family planning (called that because you can use it to get pregnant as well as prevent pregnancy). It’s simple (you can only get pregnant at certain times in your cycle), but there’s nothing for pharma to sell (it’s free!). Weirdly, doctors never seem to trust women to go through with it (and always try to push medicated birth control), but it’s easy, even before Apple added it to their products.
There are multiple methods (temp tracking, calendar tracking, vaginal mucus tracking, etc) that fall under the general header of natural family planning. High efficacy numbers only come with extremely consistent use of multiple methods. With all that work, it ties with the effectiveness of birth control pills. With only a portion of that work, it's not very effective at all in comparison.
From https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/birth-control/fertil... -
> FAMs are about 77%–98% effective. That means 2–23 out of 100 couples who use FAMs will get pregnant each year, depending on which method(s) are used. If you use multiple FAMs together, they work even better.
> The better you are about using FAMs the right way — tracking your fertility signs daily and avoiding sex or using birth control on “unsafe” days — the more effective they’ll be. But there’s a chance that you’ll still get pregnant, even if you always use them perfectly.
[0] https://www.scopus.com/record/display.uri?eid=2-s2.0-8512774...
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00057...
It also stops ovulation. It plays a huge role in female sexuality, to the point some people have trouble to orgasm.
Why imagine this?
https://behavioralscientist.org/quality-sex-relationships-bi...
> But an even bigger positive is what comes when we look at the divorce rate. Despite the whole my-sex-life-is-meh-and-I-am-not-that-attracted-to-my-partner thing, women who chose their partners when they were on the pill were significantly less likely to divorce than women who chose their partners when they were off it (!!!).
> This suggests that being on the pill may lead women to choose partners who are good resource providers and willing to stick with them through thick and thin (hence the lower divorce rate and greater satisfaction with resource investment). However, equally as noteworthy, this research found that when these pill-taking women did get divorced, they were overwhelmingly the ones who initiated it (they were the initiators 84.5 percent of the time, compared to being the initiators 73.6 percent of the time among those who chose their partners when not on the pill). This suggests that, in choosing these faithful, resource-investing men as partners (and at the expense of sexiness), pill-taking women may be putting themselves at risk for becoming dissatisfied with their relationship due to a lack of attraction and sexual satisfaction if they ever go off of it.
Emphasis is author's.
You're just pumping in outliers here. What are you trying to achieve with this?
Side effect from hormonal pills is not some sort of conspiracy. Go to feminist forum and ask about it.
What stats? Fifteen percent of what - time? women? sexual events? Is this even about climax?
Of all the things that can inhibit climax for women, why should contraception be singled out for elevated concern?
Hormones/ovulation are only part of the story.
Whether it is a justified belief on average is another question.
I have no problem imagining this, since it is, in fact, exactly what happened for me and my wife. (Not the only "huge change" in her or my chemistry, either -- weight changes and pregnancy and giving birth and COVID and... well, lots of things change body chemistry a lot.)
Not sure why you are saying this like it is something particularly alarming, though.
> This part of the prefrontal cortex is thought to sustain emotion regulation, such as decreasing fear signals in the context of a safe situation.
If the current pathological behaviour of content feed algorithms is to be believed, the vast majority of people.
This doesn't surprise me the slightest, as I've noticed change in behavior in my ex-girlfriend between the periods (pun intended) she was on pill or not. She was more emotional, and seemed to have a bit harder time to control herself.
It's quite scary how medicine with such impact are marketed as something quite benign, even by public institutions.