Here is something I bet you didn’t know.
Submitted by Dr.Kattlove’s Cancer Blog
Birth control pills help prevent ovarian cancer. I didn’t know this either until I started working for the American Cancer Society. I always wrote about risk factors – things that increased the risk of cancer. It was rare that anything was proven to reduce the risk of cancer, other than avoiding the risk factors and leading a “healthy” life. But, to my surprise, I kept running across this fact – women who took birth control pills were less likely to develop ovarian cancer.
Ovarian cancer is a serious problem. Most women who are diagnosed with it will die from it. Only about 40% live 5 years after diagnosis. It was estimated that in 2007, around 22,000 women developed ovarian cancer and about 16,000 women were killed by this disease. About a third of these women are younger than 65 so many years of potential life are cut off by this disease. And there is no screening test to detect it early, a time when it is most likely to be cured.
That is why the information about birth control pills is so interesting. This becomes one reason, other than preventing pregnancies, to opt for this form of birth control. Last week’s issue of The British Journal, The Lancet, carried a summary of all the major studies of birth control pills and ovarian cancer. The major finding was that for every 5 years a woman took birth control pills, her chances of developing ovarian cancer dropped by 20 percent. And, although this effect diminished a little with time, it lasted throughout a woman’s life. An accompanying editorial wondered whether doctors should encourage women looking for birth control to turn to the pill so they can lower their risk of ovarian cancer in later years.
No one knows for sure why birth control pills have this effect. One explanation is that the birth control pills rest the ovaries. While a woman is taking them, her ovaries don’t produce eggs on a monthly basis and along with this rest there are fewer dividing cells and less cancer. What is known, according to the researchers, is that these pills have saved many lives. Perhaps as many as 100,000 women haven’t died of ovarian cancer because they took birth control pills. And this number will increase to hundreds of thousands of lives saved as these pregnancy-preventers are rolled out to less developed countries.
Some good news for a change.
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