HealthTaking birth control raises your risk of breast cancer by 20-30%

Taking birth control raises your risk of breast cancer by 20-30%

Mary Poppins sang about “the pill they give you”, and if we were talking about these times and she was referring to contraceptives, a new scientific study has just brought to light a worrying finding that links these hormonal drugs to a small increased risk of breast cancer.

As collected Science Alertresearch published in PLOS One notes that all hormonal contraceptives carry a slightly increased risk of breast cancer, including progestogen-only pills, increasingly popular with patients. The report warns that risks and benefits must be weighed, since they also protect against other types of cancer.

This is not the first piece of research to focus on this problem: previous studies have also found a increased risk of breast cancer with bi-hormonal or combined contraceptiveswhich use both estrogens and progestogens.

However, little research existed on the use of progestogen contraceptives —also called mini-pills and which, unlike combined birth control pills, do not contain estrogen. On the rise for more than a decade, they also raise the risk of breast cancer.

One of the main conclusions of the research is that there is a very similar risk of developing breast cancer for women who use combined contraceptives as progestin-only. Specific, all of these pills raise the risk of breast cancer by 20% to 30%.

The results align with previous scientific evidence, including a large study from 1996.

Besides, the danger remains practically the same, regardless of the method of administration — oral pill, IUD, implant, or injection — or whether it is a combined or progestin-only pill.

Small increase in absolute risk

This study used data from nearly 10,000 women under the age of 50 who developed breast cancer between 1996 and 2017 in the UK, where the use of progestogen-only contraceptives is currently as widespread as the combined method. These are recommended for women who are lactating, with cardiovascular risk or smokers over 35 years of age.

the researchers calculated the absolute excess risk associated with hormonal contraceptivestaking into account that the chances of having breast cancer increase with age.

For women who took hormonal contraceptives over a five-year period between the ages of 16 and 20, the disease accounted for 8 cases of breast cancer per 100,000 women. Between the ages of 35 and 39, it was 265 cases per 100,000.

Statista

“What we’re talking about here is a very small increase in absolute risk,” says Gillian Reeves, a professor of statistical epidemiology at the University of Oxford and a co-author of the study. Stephen Duffy, a professor at Queen Mary University of London, who was not involved in the study, described the results as “reassuring, in the sense that the effect is modest.”

The increased risk must be considered along with the benefits, since oral contraceptives also provide long-term protection against other female cancers, such as ovarian cancer and endometrial cancer.

Another key finding from the study is that the risk of breast cancer decreases in the years after stopping hormonal contraceptives.

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