Birth control pills appear to remodel brain structure

Women's Brains on Steroids
By Craig H. Kinsley and Elizabeth A. Meyer
September 28, 2010

It seems that weekly we hear about some professional athlete who sullies himself and his sport through abuse of steroids. The melodrama unfolds, careers and statistics are brought low and asterisked, and everyone bemoans another fallen competitor. Yet there are millions of cases of steroid use that occur daily with barely a second thought: Millions of women take birth control pills, blithely unaware that their effects may be subtly seeping into and modulating brain structure and activity.

It is a huge experiment whose resolution will not be known for a while, but a new study in the journal Brain Research demonstrates that the effects are likely to be dramatic. It found that birth control pills have structural effects on regions of the brain that govern higher-order cognitive activities, suggesting that a woman on birth control pills may literally not be herself -- or is herself, on steroids. the rest image

The possibility that an accepted form of chemical contraception has the ability to alter the gross structure of the human brain is a cause for concern, even if the changes seem benign -- for the moment. In any event, women need to have all of the medical and now, neurobiological, information they can use in informing their personal contraceptive decisions. Like the rest of life, and like the steroid choices made by those ballplayers, there are costs and benefits.The benefits are well established; the costs, however, are still coming to light.