Over at LfDC, which suffers from the too-early closing of comments on its posts, nzc cites an article suggesting there is no biological need for women to have periods while taking oral contraceptives. JP opines:
I’m told that there are studies showing that women who skip their periods all together are at higher risk for stroke. Unfortunately, I don’t have an authoritative reference.
I just wanted to add (and couldn’t, there) that I’ve read an article (several years ago in the New Yorker, but can’t find it in their archives) suggesting that periods induced by oral contraceptives may have deleterious effects. The reason given was that since women live longer today than they ever have, and spend greater portions of their lives not being pregnant, they are subjected to a greater number of periods over their lifespans than at any time in history, which, if I recall, significantly increases the likelihood of their contracting various kinds of cancers. Or something like that, anyway.
5 Comments
Oh, stop whining, for goodness sake! I close the comments after three days as part of my effort to stop the hateful comment spammers. I don’t turn trackbacks off, though, unlike SOME PEOPLE. :-) Maybe I’ll push the close date out some, though.
I’ve heard that (real) periods prevent cancer by sloughing off the inner lining of the uterus, which is full of rapidly dividing cells secreting growth factors, which are at increased risk of mutations.
If contraceptive pills prevent real periods and inhibit the sloughing process, this could lead to an increase in cancer rates, I’d guess.
Not having periods might also be a bad thing.
Speaking from half-remembered data, and prob getting 80% of it wrong:
The uterus is suffused with all sorts of hormones, which (a) make it a mutagenic environment, (b) making it a good breeding ground (I almost wrote “breading ground”, but I don’t want to make any yeasty jokes here).
There’s speculation that menstruation is an evolutionary adaptation to periodically get rid of an infection/cancer route.
If contraceptives are already inhibiting sloughing of older tissue, then changing them to prevent all bleeding might not increase the risk much over what women are already accepting, while significantly increasing their comfort and happiness.
I was only whining because JP’s comment suddenly showed up, and I couldn’t say anything in response! Was it maybe in moderation and you approved it after comments automatically closed? Or was it there all along and I only saw it the other day because of some RSS reader bug?
Yes, exactly. I’m not too reliable at moderating comments, I’m afraid.