Many of the articles out there that we have analyzed in class seem to favor the male outcome of a stroke and female outcomes are often left out so that made me curious as to what studies are out there that look at women and stroke. I found an article about the possible increased women have to stroke due to birth control pills. We have discussed before that the possible increase is due to the fact that birth control pills can increase your risk of blood clots along with a list of other risks you have to factor when you take the pill. This particular article focuses on a review article that was published in MedLink Neurology by neurologists at Loyola University.
They lead off by talking about a 30 year old woman who had the classic symptoms of a stroke (slurred speech and loss of control of her left hand) and how she had been previously put on birth control pills. Then they continue to talk about how nearly 100 million women worldwide use the pill and how when you take them it increases your risk of a stroke by 1.9 times, this then increases the incidence of stroke for women from 4.4 ischemic strokes for every 100,000 women to about 8.5 strokes. Like we've discussed in class, one risk factor doesn't guarentee that you are going to have an incident, many other factors need to be taken into account and the article briefly touches on this fact. They say that people who take the pill and smoke have a higher risk, as well as those who have high blood pressure and a history of migraines.
Segue back to the 30 year old women, she had a history of migraines since the age of 15, because of this doctors took her off of the pill. With anything that you put into your body, you need to weigh the risks and the benefits. One thing about this article that I really don't care for is the fact that they try and give you a shock factor right off the bat, of look at this young woman suffering from a stroke and look at how birth control pills did it to here. They only briefly mention that other things may have played a bigger role into why she had suffered from a stroke. Another thing that bothers me is the fact that they mention a "well-performed meta-analysis" and say it was cited within the article itself but don't mention the name of the study.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091026152820.htm
I also found some other articles related to birth control and its affect on stroke risk and found one on the Huffington Post health section that discusses a Danish study. They found that while the pill does increase your risk of stroke, overall individual risk from the pill is very low (they were looking at combination pills of estrogen and progestin). There is a quote made by Dr. Diana B. Petitti a professor from ASU, that I agree with because I think that as a society once we hear one thing that is wrong with something we are using we immediately want to stop using it and forget the benefits we got from using the product. She says"The amount of attention paid to these minuscule risks, and what are
likely to be very small differences in vascular risk, detracts attention
from more salient issues, like preventing unwanted pregnancy." The same thing went with the discussion that we had about the link between periodontal disease and stroke.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/13/birth-control-risks-heart-attack-stroke-danish-study_n_1594765.html
I found an additional article from abcnews that talks about another woman who suffered a stroke at a young age, if you wanted to explore another case.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/birth-control-linked-heart-attack-stroke/story?id=16559498#.UGsp5nFt0Vg
I had a friend who had a severe blood clot that said the only reason why she got it was because of her birth control pill. No doubt the confidence in her reasoning came from those scary TV ads that play late at night (you know, "Have you been injured by Yaz?"). Not to mention the studies and articles that seem to exacerbate the real results. I think that it is irresponsible of journalists to exploit one case when in reality, there aren't that many cases of stroke and clotting with use of birth control. It is interesting to think about the different causes of stroke in men and women though, as you mentioned it doesn't seem like there is a lot of popular research on stroke in women. Also interesting are the social effects of claiming that BC pills are dangerous, many girls will fall prey to these inflated claims and forego an effective method of contraception. Obviously a much more dangerous outcome than the "minuscule risk."
ReplyDeleteDid the article mention the type of pill she was taking? I am curious to know whether or not the type of pill can increase/decrease you risk. For example, there are combination pills which in which the use is ingesting both estrogen and progestin and then there are progestin only pills. In addition, the combination pills can be taken in different doses so that each active pill contains a constant dose of hormones or the amounts of hormones can vary. If estrogen is responsible for blood clots, then would it be wiser to take the progestin only pills?
ReplyDeleteThe way they started to write the article in the link you posted can actually scare lots of people if they didn’t do research about it. They say “She was only 30 years old, but she was experiencing the classic symptoms of a stroke. Her speech suddenly became slurred, and her left hand became clumsy while eating. What triggered her stroke, at such a young age, may have been the birth control pills she was taking.” It seems like they didn’t consider much if the woman might not have been healthy. I went to lots of sites to see if most of sites actually agree that birth control increase women risk of getting stroke and most of it agrees. However In the womenshealth.gov (which I posted the like below) website under “Does taking birth control pills increase my risk for stroke?” it says women who are young and healthy it is safe to take the birth control pill. They only mentioned that the pill can increase the risk of stroke to some women but greater to women who are over 35 years.
ReplyDeleteI would have really like to see the actual research methods with procedures and who were on the research. It would be better if they experimented on people who are actually healthy and do not have things like diabetes, high blood pressure and other things that would cause stroke.
http://womenshealth.gov/publications/our-publications/fact-sheet/stroke.cfm#j
the big scary title of this article might make people actually read it, but from the beginning to the end of this article they keep saying how they are not completely sure if the cause of her having a stroke is just BC pills.Also as you mentioned it's so interesting that they just focused on BC pills as many other factor might have an effect on this women having a stoke.
ReplyDeleteI found this article kind of related to this subject,but here they are talking about how strong painkillers can increase risk of stoke.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8252208/Strong-painkillers-increase-risk-of-heart-or-stroke-death-research.html