Mortality associated with oral contraceptive use

BMJ 1999;319:386 ( 7 August )

Letters

Mortality associated with oral contraceptive use

Confounding might have accounted for results

Relative risk of liver cancer remains high

Authors generalise their results to cohort that was never studied

Medical profession needs to examine facts

Confounding might have accounted for results

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR $---$ Beral et al have reported an increased relative risk of death from cervical cancer among women using oral contraception.¹Their study controlled for smoking but not for the other principalrisk factors for cervical cancer, which include infection withhuman papillomavirus of a high risk type, sexual behaviour, andinadequate cervical screening. There is therefore a considerablerisk of confounding, which could account for theresults.

The authors do not give patterns of use of contraception by never users and non-users of oral contraceptives; it would beinteresting to know what proportion of this comparison group wasusing barrier methods. Such women are at reduced risk of cervicalcancer,² and therefore a comparison that includes a large proportionof women using barrier methods will seem, artificially, to increaseany risk in pillusers.

It should also be noted that durations of use of less than 10 years are not . . . [Full text of this article]

CiteULike

Complore

Connotea

Del.icio.us Add to Digg

Digg

StumbleUpon Add to Technorati

Technorati What's this?

Relevant Article

Mortality associated with oral contraceptive use: 25 year follow up of cohort of 46 000 women from Royal College of General Practitioners' oral contraception study: Valerie Beral, Carol Hermon, Clifford Kay, Philip Hannaford, Sarah Darby, and Gillian Reeves
BMJ 1999 318: 96-100. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]