Oral contraceptives safe in lupus patients
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Women with lupus can safely take oral contraceptives without fear that the pill will worsen their condition, two studies released on Wednesday showed.
The studies in this week’s issue of The New England Journal of Medicine shake up the conventional wisdom that discouraged doctors from prescribing the pill and forced many female lupus patients to opt for less convenient contraceptives or even abortion.
“To everybody’s shock, we discovered that once someone has established lupus, contraceptives are not bad,” Dr. Michelle Petri, chief author of one study, told Reuters. “It has shaken up the whole notion of what’s contributing to lupus in the first place,” she said.
Lupus is an autoimmune disease that can affect the skin, kidneys, joints and circulation. Up to 1.5 million people in the United States have some form of lupus and over 16,000 Americans develop the long-term illness every year.
Because nine times more women than men have lupus and hormones may play a role, there has been concern that birth control pills might cause symptoms of the disease to worsen.
“Generations of doctors have not prescribed oral contraceptives to lupus patients,” said Petri of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “We were all wrong. We didn’t know we were wrong until this study was done.”
Her study found that a severe lupus flare-up was just as likely to occur in the 91 women who received an oral contraceptive containing estrogen and progesterone as in the 92 who got a placebo. The rates of mild or moderate flares were also the same in both groups.
In all of the women, the disease was stable.
The other study, involving 162 Mexican volunteers, found that the flare-up rate and the severity of the flare-ups was the same whether patients got standard birth control pills, a progestin-only pill, or a copper intrauterine device (IUD) to prevent pregnancy.
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