Taking Pill Cuts Long-Term Risk of Ovarian Cancer

Jan 25, 08:37 AM

The contraceptive Pill should be made available to women over the counter after the largest study of its link with ovarian cancer showed it has prevented 100,000 deaths from the disease worldwide, a leading medical journal says.

Fifty years after the Pill was launched, The Lancet says it is time to remove the requirement for a doctor's prescription and offer it directly to women on demand.

Its call is prompted by "dramatic" findings from a huge study of ovarian cancer, published simultaneously in the British Medical Journal, which combined results from 45 smaller studies in 21 countries. The findings show that taking the Pill sharply reduces the risk of developing ovarian cancer and the protective effect increases with length of use.

For individual women, the reduction in risk is small - ovarian cancer is a rare disease - but because three million women take the Pill in Britain and 100 million round the world, it has a large effect.

Researchers led by Professor Valerie Beral, head of the Cancer Research UK epidemiology unit at Oxford University, found that in Western countries, including the UK, 10 years of taking the Pill reduced the incidence of ovarian cancer before age 75 from 12 cases per 1,000 women to eight. Deaths were cut from seven women per 1,000 to five.

The most remarkable finding, the researchers say, is that the protection lasted for more than 30 years after Pill use was stopped. This is important because ovarian cancer is commoner in older women who have passed the menopause. Professor Beral said: "Worldwide, the Pill has already prevented 200,000 women from developing cancer of the ovary and has prevented 100,000 deaths from the disease.

"More than 100 million women are now taking the Pill, so the number of ovarian cancers prevented will rise over the next few decades to about 30,000 per year."

The Lancet editorial says that the "dramatic" findings reopen the question of whether oral contraceptives should be made more widely available in light of the latest study.

"We strongly endorse more widespread over-the-counter access to a preventive agent that can not only prevent cancers but also demonstrably save the lives of tens of thousands of women," it says.

(c) 2008 Independent, The; London (UK). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved. Taking Pill Cuts Long-Term Risk of Ovarian Cancer
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