When Bayer announced that its newly approved birth control pill Bayaz, with the same active ingredients as its best-selling Yaz pill, also contains a B-vitamin that helps prevent neural tube birth defects such as spina bifida, consumers couldn’t help but scratch their heads. Why load a pill that is 99 percent effective against preventing pregnancy with a vitamin that is prescribed for pregnant women?
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a new oral contraceptive from Bayer, makers of the blockbuster birth control pills Yaz and Yasmin. Called Beyaz, the new pill contains the same estrogen-progestin combination and the diuretic drospirenone as Yaz, plus another ingredient – .451 mg of levomefolate calcium.
“Should I still be on Yasmin?” asks Beth on a Drugs.com forum. The woman has been taking the popular birth control pills for two years and suddenly developed migraines with blurry vision. Soon after, she had knee surgery and developed a very large blood clot in her leg, called a deep vein thrombosis, or DVT. Doctors put her on the blood thinner coumadin and told her to continue taking Yasmin, but Beth is worried. “I’m swelled up like a balloon,” she writes. “Should I really still be on Yasmin?”
You’d be hard pressed not to call Gina Miller healthy. The chief financial officers of an Indianapolis company and mother of three young children still made time to run up to 35 miles a week. But her active lifestyle came to an abrupt stop shortly after she began taking the birth control pill Yaz.
Watson Pharmaceuticals has received approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under the Abbreviated New Drug Application for Zarah, its new oral contraceptive pill that serves as a generic version of Bayer’s best-selling birth control pill Yasmin. Yasmin and its generic equivalents sold approximately $97 million in the U.S. for the twelve months ending June 30, 2010.
When Mollie, a 31-year-old marathon runner, was diagnosed with bilateral pulmonary embolism, doctors immediately said it was because she was taking Yaz birth control pills. “While I was in the hospital my doctor told me he had 12 other girls – all under 35, non-smokers, active (not overweight), all on Yaz – who were admitted within the same week for clots in their lungs,” Mollie wrote on an eHealth forum. “Twelve girls in one week! At one hospital! I am shocked and don’t understand how this drug can still be on the market.”
Last spring, Tara Jones gave into her dermatologist’s advice and agreed to take birth control pills to clear up moderate acne. Doing so almost killed her. “I had a deep vein thrombosis in my leg that broke off into many blood clots that traveled through my heart and into my lungs. If large enough, these clots, called pulmonary embolisms, could cause sudden death,” Jones wrote for BSU Daily.
There are a slew of pros and cons when it comes to birth control pills. They help prevent unwanted pregnancies, but they can increase a woman’s risk of life-threatening blood clots. Now a team of Swedish researchers have concluded that oral contraceptives may reduce a woman’s risk of developing lower urinary tract problems.
