Yaz health risks: better safe than sorry?
October 2nd, 2009 by Kurt Niland
Bayer Healthcare’s blockbuster drug Yaz has come under fire in recent years for its potential to cause a spectrum of health problems. Bayer has downplayed these serious risks while drawing attention to some of the drug’s other uses as treatments for acne and the emotional and physical symptoms associated with premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD). Adding to the confusion is a series of clinical tests designed to quantify the drug’s safety risks. Results of the studies have both supported cast doubt on the claims of women who say they have been harmed by Yaz. With your health and possibly your life at stake, who do you trust?
The New York Times recently published a report about the dangers frequently associated with Yaz and other oral contraceptives. The article observes that one Bayer-sponsored European study involving tens of thousands of women found no difference in the level of cardiovascular problems or death between women taking Yaz and women who took levonorgestrel, a much older progestin-based drug.
However, the results of two other studies conducted in Denmark and the Netherlands and published in the British Medical Journal last month, showed that women who took Yaz and other newer progestins had a higher risk of blood clots, which can adversely affect the heart.
One doctor quoted in the New York Times report theorized that Yaz and other newer forms of birth control may have a different affect in European populations versus the more racially diverse and genetically mixed American population.
However, Dr. Frits Rosendaal, a clinical epidemiologist at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, told the New York Times that patients taking Yaz should switch to birth control drugs containing levonorgestrel. “Even if the risk of thrombosis is low, why not choose the lowest risk, just in case?” he told the New York Times.
Both Bayer and the FDA are conducting ongoing studies designed to measure the safety risks of Yaz and Yasmin against drugs that do not contain drospirenone.