By Helaina Thompson
“There’s a serious new risk associated with hormonal birth control,” a Cosmopolitan headline alerted women last month. The risk? Depression, says a study recently published in JAMA Psychiatry. Journalists from Cosmopolitan to the New York Times were quick to report the Danish study’s findings, that women on hormonal birth control experienced a 40 percent greater risk of depression.
Forty percent may sound scary, but that leap represented less than 1 percent of all women in the study, which most publications failed to add. The study itself gleaned information from two administrative databases that records when women are prescribed medications. If a woman was prescribed birth control and then antidepressants, researchers presumed a correlation between the two.
Research that pulls from administrative databases is “quick-and-dirty research,” writes David Grimes in an editorial about such issues, a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, where proper hypotheses and controls are often neglected.
In a recent editorial, Grimes wrote that research that pulls from administrative databases is “quick-and-dirty research” in which proper hypotheses and controls are often neglected.
For example, the Danish study cannot say whether women took their birth control regularly — or at all. Grimes compares this to “trying to study the epidemiology of automobile accidents with a Department of Motor Vehicles database. Age, height, weight, and eye and hair color cannot explain why accidents occur.”
After invoking fear with click-bait scare tactics — like the New York Post’s headline, “Birth control is turning women into hormonal messes” — many journalists fell short of reporting alternate reasons that women may take antidepressants following a birth-control prescription. The Danish researchers themselves noted that antidepressants are prescribed to treat conditions other than depression. Another possible reason? Talking about birth control with your health-care provider creates a sense of trust between patient and doctor — it involves, after all, one of the most intimate aspects of a person’s life. Once this trust is established, talking to your doctor about depression may be easier.
Any risk of depression should not be diminished, of course. We must invest in better women’s health research with tightly controlled variables and follow-up studies to truly investigate the role hormonal changes play in depression. Meanwhile, journalists must hold scientists accountable for any weak points in their research.
For now, we know this: since the rise of birth control, more women have gone to college. Women’s wages have increased, and teen pregnancies have decreased. Abortion rates are falling as improved contraceptives and greater access help women prevent unwanted pregnancies.
Women should not allow one flawed study to deter them from using safe, effective birth control. Birth control — and that includes long-acting forms such as IUDs and implants — is covered under most health insurance plans. University of Iowa students can, and should, visit Student Health to talk through their birth control options. And while in the waiting room, we should be skeptical of any magazine headlines we read.