In the media today there have been several reports of the increased risk of cervical cancer for women taking the contraceptive pill. All these reports relate to a Lancet article that has been published this week - unfortunately I won’t get access until next week when it hits “Pill cancer risk soars”. This seems a little strong for a headline considering the story continues thus:
The rate of cervical cancer for women up to 50 who have not used the Pill is 3.8 per thousand.
This increases to 4.0 per thousand in women on the Pill for five years and to 4.5 per thousand on the popular combined contraceptive pills for 10 years.
So, even if you want to reduce to simple percentages, women who have been on the pill for 5 years they have increased their risk from 0.38 % to 0.4 %. That’s just over a 5 % increase if you want to use the typical tabloid method of mishandling such figures. For 10 year users the increase is ~18% using the same rather dubious methodology.
What really matters is that the actual change in risk is actually rather small, 0.38 % to 0.45 % is probably not much to worry about considering the huge number of other factors that influence a persons well-being.
The other thing I want to comment about on this is an avenue that may or may not have been raised in the Lancet article - I’ll update when I know. One of the known causes of cervical cancer are certain forms of Human papillomavirus (HPV). HPV is a sexually transmitted disease. Is it not possible that, due to the use of the contraceptive pill, some women may be less meticulous with the use of barrier contraceptives thus leaving themselves open (that wasn’t supposed to be an innuendo) to infection with HPV and therefore an increased chance of cervical cancer?
Obviously this is all speculation so if anyone out there has more information on the subject please comment below or email me (address on the about page).
I can’t be bothered to coax my connection into retrieving the article itself but a quick glance at the abstract:
“Relative risks of cervical cancer were estimated by conditional logistic regression, stratifying by study, age, number of sexual partners, age at first intercourse, parity, smoking, and screening.”
Suggests that they didn’t control for barrier contraception usage.