Birth control pills could help prevent suicide

By Jim Leffman via SWNS

Women who take birth control pills are more than a third less likely to attempt suicide, a new study has shown.

Previous research had indicated the contraceptive pill actually increased the risk but this has now been disproved.

As one of the most widely used pharmaceutical products, there were concerns over the safety of the contraceptive pill following other studies.

But the new in-depth research on more than 500,000 women has shown that rates of attempted suicide are actually lower in those that take the pill compared to the rest of the female population.

In fact, it is 37 percent lower in those that take the hormonal contraceptive and pills containing the drug ethinylestradiol seemed to have the strongest effect.

The researchers from the University of Helsinki had actually set out to confirm the previous research.

Presenting the findings at the European Congress of Psychiatry, Lead Researcher, Dr. Elena Toffol said: "We set out to verify previous data, so this is not what we expected, and it’s good news for contraceptive users."

The team used several Finnish national databases to compare attempted suicide rates of hormonal contraceptive users and non-users using data from the 2017-2019 period.

They took results from 587,823 women, which represents around 50% of the total number of women in the 15-49 age group in Finland.

Half of these women had used hormonal contraceptives, including pills, implants, patches, and rings.

They found that attempted suicide rates between hormonal contraceptive users and non-users were similarly high in women between 15-19, reflecting the higher risk of suicide attempts in that age group.

However, suicide rates dropped in older age groups, with the greatest drop in hormonal contraceptive users relative to non-users in the 20-29 age groups.

Dr. Toffol said: “Women, especially younger women, have higher rates of depression and attempted suicide than men of similar ages.

"Many women using hormonal contraceptives, especially contraceptive pills, report mood changes as a side effect.

"Initial reports from 2018 and 2020 had indicated that use of hormonal contraceptives was associated with a higher number or risk of suicides and suicide attempts. We set out to confirm this data."

“The strength of this study is the large size, and that we broke the data down according to suicide attempts, psychiatric history, age and contraceptive use.

"We included a wider age range than the other studies, and importantly, we used a ‘nested’ study design, where we were able to pair each attempted suicide to four control subjects, which allows us to see if contraceptive use in the previous six months was a factor in the attempt.

"After doing this we found that women with no psychiatric history and using hormonal contraceptives, specifically those containing ethinylestradiol had a significantly reduced risk of attempting suicide than women not using any hormonal contraception.

"The data indicates redeemed prescriptions, and of course it may be that some of these prescriptions were redeemed but not used.

"Overall though, we think we have been able to account for most confounding factors.

"Our next step is to use data from this same population to examine the risk of depression associated with hormonal contraception use."

Commenting on the findings, Editor in Chief of the journal European Psychiatry Professor Andrea Fiorillo at the University of Campania in Naples said: “This interesting study focused on the complex relationship between hormonal contraception exposure and suicidal behavior.

"Previous studies found a relationship between hormonal contraceptive use and higher risk of attempted suicide.

"The study by Toffol disconfirms this finding, showing that the rates of suicide attempts are actually lower in women using hormonal contraception.

"Of course, this striking finding deserves a careful evaluation and needs to be replicated in different cohorts of women and controlled for the impact of several psychosocial stressors, such as economic upheavals, social insecurity and uncertainty due to the COVID pandemic.

"The clinical implications of the study are obvious and may help to destigmatize the use of hormonal contraceptives.”