Women who took the pill as teenagers are 3 times more likely to experience depression later
If you took oral contraceptives as a teenager, you may be at higher risk of depression as an adult, even if you stopped taking the pill years ago, according to a new study from University of British Columbia researchers.
In a survey of over 1,200 adult women, researchers found that women who had used birth control pills in their teenage years were up to three times more likely to be clinically depressed than women who had never used the pill.
Teenage users were also 1.7 times more likely to become depressed later in life than women who only started using the pill as adults.
Christine Anderl, postdoctoral fellow at UBC’s psychology department and the study’s lead author, says the results show there’s still much to learn about the long-term effects of hormonal birth control use.
She notes women are twice as likely as men to develop depression at some point in their lives.
Anderl says animal studies have shown changes to sex hormones during puberty can have an irreversible impact on brain development, but the link between hormonal birth control use and depression for humans is less clear.
According to the study, published Wednesday in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, the correlation between birth control use and depression was consistent even after the researchers controlled for other factors like age of first sexual intercourse, age of first period, socio-economic status, smoking history and previous pregnancies.
However, the data they used didn’t show if there was an increased risk for women who had used oral contraceptives for a longer period of time.
Anderl says more research is needed to determine whether using birth control pills as a teenager actually causes depression.
