Can the birth control pill alter the way your memory works?

A UC Irvine study indicates that women who use contraceptives experience certain memory changes. Specifically, their ability to remember the gist of an emotional event improves, while women who don’t use contraceptives better retain details.

“What’s most exciting about this study is that it shows the use of hormonal contraception alters memory,” said study researcher Shawn Nielsen. “There are only a handful of studies examining the cognitive effects of the pill, and more than 100 million women use it worldwide.”

Nielson stressed that the pill does not damage memory. “It’s a change in the type of information they remember, not a deficit.”

The researchers speculate the changes happen because contraceptives work by suppressing sex hormones such as estrogen and progesterone to prevent pregnancy.
These suppressed hormones are strongly linked to “left brain” memory which deals with feeling and emotion.

For the study, researchers had women who were on the pill and women who were not look at photographs of a mother, her son, and a car accident. They also listined to audio narratives that either said the car had hit a curb or that the car had hit the boy and critically injured them.

One week later, the women were given a surprise recall test. Women who had been on the pill for as little as one month remembered more clearly the main components of the traumatic event – that there had been an accident, that the boy had been rushed to the hospital, that doctors worked to save his life and successfully reattached both his feet, for instance.

Women who were not on the pill remembered more details, such as the presence of a fire hydrant next to the car.

The researchers say the results shed light on why women experience post traumatic stress syndrome more frequently than men, and why men remember differently than women.

In contrast to women, men typically rely more on right-hemisphere brain activity to encode memory. They retain the gist of things better than details. Women on the pill, who have lower levels of hormones associated with female reproduction, may remember emotional events similarly to men.

The results were published in the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.

Columbia University researchers say they are honing in on the development of what may be the first non-steroidal oral contraceptive for men.

The researchers found that low doses of a drug compound stopped sperm production in male mice with no adverse side effects.  Furthermore, normal fertility was restored soon after the researchers stopped administering the drug.

The drug works by interfering with retinoic acid receptors (RARs), which deprives the body of vitamin A.  Scientists have long known that depriving an animal of vitamin A causes male sterility.

Earlier research had found that manipulating the retinoid receptor pathway could interfere with spermatogenesis, a process necessary for sperm production.

Previously, a company called Bristol Myers had been experimenting with the compound for the treatment of skin and inflammatory diseases.  They discontinued the project after finding that the drug was a “testicular toxin.”

“We were intrigued,” said Dr. Debra Wolgemuth, professor of genetics and development and of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia University Medical Center, in a press release. “One company’s toxin may be another person’s contraceptive.”

Wolgemoth and her team found that a dose as little as 1.0mg/kg of body weight over a 4-week period was enough to induce reversible male sterility.

The drug has an advantage over steroidal hormone-based methods, the researchers say, because steroidal methods are often plagued with side-effects, including variability in efficacy, increased risk of cardiovascular disease and diminished libido.

“We have seen no side effects, so far, and our mice have been mating quite happily,” said Dr. Wolgemuth.

An additional benefit of the compound is that it can be taken orally as a pill, according to researchers, which avoids the the injection process.

Further testing is needed to prove the compound is safe, effective and reversible even after years of use.

The research was published in the journal Endocrinology with funding from the National Institutes of Health.

Ladies, if you’re gaining weight and looking to cut something from your diet – it doesn’t have to be your oral contraceptive.

According to researchers from the Oregon Health & Science University, the birth control pill does not cause weight gain, HealthNews.com reported.

Researchers divided rhesus macaque monkeys – whose reproductive system is almost identical to that of humans -  into obese and normal weight groups and then administered doses of oral contraceptives to them for eight months.

Over that time period, the researchers monitored the monkeys’ weight, food intake, body fat, activity level and lean muscle mass. The weight of the normal group remained stable over time, while the obese group actually lost 8.5 percent of their weight and 12 percent of their body fat.  There were no changes in food intake, activity, or lean muscle mass for either group.

These findings are significant because, “concern about weight gain is one of the main reasons why women may avoid or discontinue birth control, which in turn places them at greater risk for an unplanned pregnancy,” according to Alison Edelman M.D., a physician and researcher in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Oregon Health & Science University and lead author of the study.

When taken correctly, oral contraceptives are over 99 percent effective at preventing pregnancies (though they do not protect against STDs, so condoms are still necessary).  Also, women who take oral contraceptives are about 50 percent less likely to develop ovarian and endometrial cancer than those who have never used them.

The study will be published in next month’s issue of Human Reproduction.

Click here to read more from HealthNews.com.

Are there concerns about usage of the birth control pill? Dr. Michael Petriella, Vice Chairman of the Dept. of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Hackensack University Medical Center, talks about concerns related to hormonal contraception.