Oral Contraceptives May Decrease Death Risk, Researchers Say

March 12, 2010— -- Taking "the pill" won't increase a woman's risk of death -- in fact, oral contraceptive users may live longer, researchers say.

In a population-based study of women in the U.K., death from any cause was 12 percent lower among birth control pill users than among those who never took the drugs, Dr. Philip Hannaford of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and colleagues reported online in BMJ.

"This is very reassuring and enables us to say with confidence to women that if they choose to use the pill as their contraceptive, they are highly unlikely to do long-term damage to themselves," Hannaford said in an e-mail to MedPage Today.

Previous studies have shown no increased risk of mortality with oral contraceptive use, but the researchers said they didn't have a long enough follow-up.

So they assessed data from the Royal College of General Practitioners' Oral Contraceptive Study, which began in 1968. It contains mortality data from general practitioners and National Health Service central registries on 46,112 women who were followed for 39 years.

A total of 1,747 deaths occurred in patients who never used oral contraceptives, and 2,864 occurred among those who had. The researchers noted that they were able to include three times as many deaths in their assessment as previous studies. The women studied used birth control pills for an average of 44 months.

Those who did use the pills had a significantly lower rate of death from any cause. They also had significantly lower rates of death from all cancers -- including bowel cancer, uterine cancer and ovarian cancer -- the researchers said.

Investigators also found lower rates of death from circulatory disease, ischemic heart disease, and other disease among women who had used birth control pills.

"We do know that pill users have a lower risk of death from some cancers which persists for many years after stopping, [which] could account for the lower risk of cancer deaths in pill users," Hannaford said.