Combined Oral Contraceptive Pills Impair Women’s Defensive Responses

Women using oral contraceptive medications that combine synthetic estrogen and progesterone hormones experience a thinning of a brain fear-promoting region. Quebec neuropsychiatric researcher report this finding following their study of 37 young oral contraceptive users, 40 never users, and 41 men,

Both groups of women, contraceptive users and non-users, demonstrated enhanced brain fear centers compared with men. Compared with non-users, those women regularly taking combined oral contraceptives had thinner fear centers in their prefrontal brain zones. These reductions in the brain tissues responsible for mounting fear and flee responses are associated with the lower doses of estrogens found in oral contraceptives that also contain progesterone.

The study does not address whether or not these anatomic brain changes put women at greater risk by significantly impeding their defensive instincts, but it raises that possibility.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fendo.2023.1228504/full

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