Oral contraceptive use and mortality

A cohort study by researchers in Boston followed over 120,000 nurses for 36 years, looking at their health and wellbeing.  One focus of the study was on their oral contraceptive use to determine whether it was linked to mortality by any cause.  The results of this aspect of the Nurses' Health Study were recently published in the BMJ: Oral contraceptive use and mortality after 36 years of follow-up in the Nurses’ Health Study: prospective cohort study.

The researchers found that all cause mortality did not differ significantly between women who had ever used oral contraceptives and those who had never used them. They did find that oral contraceptive use had a correlation with certain causes of death, including increased rates of violent or accidental death and deaths due to breast cancer, whereas deaths due to ovarian cancer were less common among women who used oral contraceptives.

One of the authors of the paper, Karin Michels, was interviewed by Dr Norman Swan on ABC RN's Health Report last week and she made it clear that the results pertain to earlier oral contraceptive formulations with higher hormone doses rather than the now more commonly used low-dose contraceptives.

Contact your library if you have trouble downloading the fulltext of the article. BMJ 2014;349:g6356.