Please let me remind you of the “pill-scare” in the 1990s. In 1995 the U.K. Committee on Safety of Medicines “informed” the public that 3rd-generation oral contraceptive pills increase the risk of thromboembolism twofold. Scared women refrained from taking the pill and pill sales fell. This probably led to 13000 additional abortions and 13000 additional births in the following year in England and Wales. Presumably the pill-scare would not have happened if the public had been informed about the underlying tiny difference in absolute risk.

I therefore ask the authors in due respect of their work to add an estimate of the absolute risk difference to the increase of risk associated with injectable progestin.

References

Furedi,A (1999). The public health implications of the 1995 ‘pill scare.’ Human Reproduction Update, 5, 621–626.

Gigerenzer G et al. (2007). Helping Doctors and Patients Make Sense of Health Statistics. Psychological Science in the Public Interest 8:2, 53-96.

Competing interests: None declared