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.
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.”
Rose Kirby, 22, was vacuuming out her car when she felt a strange discomfort in her arm. Within an hour it turned into “a pink balloon,” she said. She passed it off as a bug bite or some sort of allergic reaction, but her parents were skeptical. “I was really lucky that my parents made me go to the doctor that day,” she said.
Obese women have just the same protection against getting pregnant while taking birth control pills as normal-weight women, according to a study published in a recent edition of the American College of Obstetrics & Gynecology’s green journal. This finding puts into question previous studies that have suggested that obese women required higher doses of oral contraceptives for the pills to be as effective as in normal-weight women.
The number of lawsuits filed in federal district court against Bayer and its blockbuster birth control pill Yaz has doubled to 2,000, and that doesn’t include the hundreds more that have been filed in state courts, according to the Madison Record. The lawsuits allege that Bayer did not adequately warn women that by taking Yaz, as well as Bayer’s similar birth control pill Yasmin, they were at greater risk for serious side effects including blood clots, pulmonary embolism, deep vein thrombosis, stroke, heart attack and even gallbladder problems.
Any kind of hormonal change can elicit a flare of acne, from going on or off birth control, having a baby, or entering perimenopause or menopause. There are a variety of topical and oral acne treatments, including some birth control pills. But before you turn to hormonal therapy to treat those annoying breakouts, you should consider the risks, says Dr. Diane Berson, assistant clinical professor of dermatology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York.
Members of the Oral Contraceptive Over-the-Counter Working Group are advocating to – you guessed it – make birth control pills available for women without a prescription. But it is in the best interest for women when they can carry serious and even life-threatening risks?
Dawn Varrechio, a mother of four, was shocked to discover that her breathing problems were due to blood clots in both of her lungs. But she became angry when she found out her birth control pills were the culprit. “It’s scary to think that at 35, you could be gone, like that quickly,” she told CBS3 News.
Irina Shiryaeva was ecstatic when her family won the “green card lottery,” earning them sought-after immigration papers allowing them to leave their hometown in Russia and move to the United States. But her dream was cut short when she died shortly after arriving in the United States. Irina suffered from a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot in her lungs. Doctors theorized it was the long, nine-hour plane ride coupled with her recent use of birth control pills.
Even before Bayer Healthcare agreed to change the label on its No. 1 selling birth control pills, Yaz and Yasmin, to include an elevated risk of blood clots and other health problems, a citizen’s right advocacy group placed the oral contraceptive on its “Do Not Use” list. The move by Public Citizen was in direct response to the mounting lawsuits filed against the company alleging the pills caused high potassium levels that can cause the heart to slow down and allow life-threatening blood clots to form.
