Women who use hormonal contraceptives had fewer suicide attempts: Research

Hormonal contraceptives, such as the birth control pill, are among the most often prescribed medications. Hormonal contraceptives have been related to an increase in attempted suicide in recent study, raising concerns about their safety. According to a new study, women who use hormonal contraception had less attempted suicides than women who do not use hormonal contraception.

Dr Elena Toffol (University of Helsinki), who presented the findings at the European Congress of Psychiatry, said: “We set out to validate existing evidence, so this is not what we expected, and it’s fantastic news for contraceptive users.”

She went on, “Women, particularly younger women, experience greater rates of depression and attempted suicide than males of comparable ages. Many women who use hormonal contraceptives, particularly tablets, have mood swings as a side effect. The usage of hormonal contraceptives was linked to a greater number/risk of suicides and suicide attempts, according to early studies from 2018 and 2020. We set out to verify the information “,.

The University of Helsinki researchers compared attempted suicide rates of hormonal contraception users and non-users using data from 2017 to 2019. They gathered data from 587,823 women, over half of the total number of women in Finland aged 15 to 49.

She went on, “Women, particularly younger women, experience greater rates of depression and attempted suicide than males of comparable ages. Many women who use hormonal contraceptives, particularly tablets, have mood swings as a side effect. The usage of hormonal contraceptives was linked to a greater number/risk of suicides and suicide attempts, according to early studies from 2018 and 2020. We set out to verify the information “,.

The University of Helsinki researchers compared attempted suicide rates of hormonal contraception users and non-users using data from 2017 to 2019. They gathered data from 587,823 women, over half of the total number of women in Finland aged 15 to 49.

Hormonal contraceptives, such as tablets, implants, patches, and rings, were used by half of the women.
In women aged 15 to 19, attempted suicide rates were similar between hormonal contraceptive users and non-users (in general, suicide rates are higher in younger women and decrease with age), but suicide rates fell in older age groups, with a greater drop in hormonal contraceptive users than non-users in the 20-24 and 25-29 age groups. The researchers discovered 474 cases of attempted suicide in women who did not use hormonal contraceptives, compared to just 344 attempts in women who did. In compared to those who used hormonal contraceptives, women who did not use contraceptives had a 37% higher risk of attempting suicide.

“The strength of this study is its magnitude, as well as the fact that we split down the data by suicide attempts, psychiatric history, age, and contraceptive usage,” Dr. Toffol stated. We employed a ‘nested’ research design, in which each attempted suicide was paired with four control participants, allowing us to evaluate if contraceptive usage in the prior six months was a role in the attempt. We discovered that women without a psychiatric history who used hormonal contraceptives, especially those containing ethinylestradiol, had a considerably lower chance of attempting suicide than women who did not use any hormonal contraception.

The data shows prescriptions that were redeemed, although it’s possible that some of these prescriptions were redeemed but never utilised. Overall, we believe we have accounted for the majority of confounding variables. The next stage will be to assess the risk of depression connected with the use of hormonal contraception using data from the same cohort.”