Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles, P.C.

The benefits of using birth control pills outweigh the risks, according to a Style Bistro story, which supports the use of oral contraceptives for the treatment of acne. There are three birth control pills that are FDA-approved for such use – Ortho Tri-Cyclen, Estrostep, and Yaz. The latter of these is one of the nation’s most prescribed birth control pills. It is also under a new safety review by the FDA based on data that links use of the pills to serious and life threatening health risks.

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Pharmaceutical manufacturer Bayer is facing thousands of lawsuits questioning the safety of its birth control pills Yaz and Yasmin. The pills, which contain a combination of drospirenone and ethinyl estradiol, have been found in studies to put women at greater risk for life threatening blood clots than oral contraceptives with other types of hormones. Both Yaz and Yasmin have generic equivalents, which leaves some women questioning whether generic brands are safer than the brand name drugs.

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It didn’t make sense to Joan Cummins of Hackettstown, N.J., that her daughter Michelle Pfleger would drop dead. The college freshman died suddenly last fall, which was later determined by medical examiners to have been caused by a pulmonary thromboemboli, or blood clots in her lungs.

Cummins believes it was her daughter’s birth control pills, which she also took for the treatment of acne, that caused her death. She has filed suit against the Bayer Corp., makers of the birth control Yaz, and several of its divisions. The lawsuit was filed as part of a national class-action lawsuit against the makers of Yaz.

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Bayer is trying to silence the critics of its blockbuster birth control pills Yaz and Yasmin by taking nay-sayers to court. But even in Europe where the laws don’t always guarantee free speech, Bayer is hardly getting a sympathetic ear.

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Bayer isn’t backing down. The pharmaceutical giant that is making billions off sales of it’s popular birth control pills Yaz and Yasmin, says two new studies that suggest the company’s oral contraceptives put women at greater risk for blood clots than older generation pills, are flawed.

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Bayer has long denied that its birth control pills, Yaz and Yasmin, put women at greater risk for life threatening blood clots, but a new study published in the British Medical Journal says the “fourth generation” oral contraceptives, which contain the progestin drospirenone, put women at twice the risk for blood clots than those that contain the hormone levonorgestrel.

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Women who take birth control pills with the hormone drospirenone, such as Yaz and Yasmin, are at greater risk of gallbladder damage than women on other oral contraceptives, according to a new Canadian study. The new research involved 2.7 million women who took birth control pills for at least six months between 1997 and 2009. A total of 27,087 women in the study group underwent surgery to have their gallbladders removed. The study found that while all birth control pills put women at some risk for losing their gallbladders, women who use pills with drospirenone were at greater risk.

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More teenagers are using birth control pills than ever before, and by far the most popular brand they are choosing is Yaz, according to a new study by Thomson Reuters. But some worry that using Bayer Healthcare’s blockbuster oral contraceptive may be putting those young girls at greater risk for serious health problems.

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Europe’s biggest drug company, Bayer AG, has won a lawsuit in the United Kingdom, protecting the patent on its birth control pill Yasmin against a challenge by Hungary’s Gedeon Richter Nyrt. Justice Christopher Floyd ruled in the High Court of London that the inventions the patents covered for Yasmin would not have been “obvious” to experts in the industry. The ruling is in contrast to a case in the United States in 2008, in which the Yasmin patent was found to be invalid because it was “obvious” to other experts in the field. That ruling opened the door for Israel’s massive generic drug manufacturer, Teva Pharmaceuticals Industries Ltd., to sell a version of Yasmin, known as Ocella, in the United States.

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A new research study suggests that women who take the so-called “mini” birth control pill may be more than three times more likely to become diabetic after pregnancy. The risk is even greater if a woman uses the mini-pill after having gestational diabetes. Mini pills contain just one hormone, progestin, compared to a combination of two hormones, progesterone and estrogen, in traditional birth control pills. The latter variety is far more popular in the United States.

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