Sir, - The report entitled "Pill study shows no long term effects" (The Irish Times, January 8th) contains only half the story and is misleading to your readers. The study in question (British Medical Journal, January 9th) explicitly reports "significant excess mortality" amongst women who are current users and recent users (up to 10 years since first use). For this group, the risk of death for cervical cancer was increased by as much as 200 per cent and for cerebrovascular disease (stroke) by 170 per cent. It was only amongthose who survived the first 10 years that the relative risk returned to baseline! Small comfort this for those women who did die of clotting, stroke or cancer. These women, for obvious reasons, weren't included in the statistics for those women surviving for 10 years! As a pharmacist, I ask how this is "fantastic news", as Prof Walter Prenderville is reported as saying.
In this study, there is no denial of mortality in the early years of use. In fact, the researchers explicitly state more than once that "the effects of oral contraceptives on mortality occur mainly in current and recent users". In the interests of balanced reporting this too should have been reported.
One glaring weakness in this study was the statistics for breast cancer. The women involved had a median age of 24 years at the start of the study and 49 years of age at the end, thus omitting entirely any relevance to the widely documented effect of early pill use (19 years of age or less). For women under 20 using the pill, there is a 480 per cent higher risk of breast cancer than for neverusers of the pill. In one Dutch study, 97 per cent of women with invasive breast cancer, diagnosed before age 36, had formerly used the pill. - Yours, etc.,
Patrick McCrystal, MPSI, Executive Director, Human Life International (Ireland), Belvedere Place, Dublin 1.