Do you need prescription medication? Ask Your Dr for confidential and convenient access to certain medications. Enter your postcode to find your nearest pharmacy that can help.Is the pill messing with your head?
More than 100 million women around the world are thought to use the contraceptive pill, yet a new study shows just how much more we have to learn about the way it affects the body – or in this case, the mind.
Researchers writing in the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory have discovered that women on the pill remember things differently to those who don't use it. According to the neurobiologists who carried out the study, women on the pill are better at remembering the emotional impact of an event, whereas those who don't take it remember more details.
So for instance, if two women were to witness a car crash, the one taking the pill may remember more about the accident victims' injuries and the rush to get them to hospital, whereas the other who's not taking the pill may remember more about how the accident happened – who was where, which car caused the accident, and so on.
The researchers explain it's all about the hormone balance in the brain (here's where it gets technical). If you take the pill, your natural production of the sex hormones oestrogen and progesterone is suppressed – that's one of the ways in which the pill prevents pregnancy. But, interestingly, those hormones are also associated with left-brain thinking.
The left hemisphere of the brain is thought to be associated with more analytical tasks and language skills, for instance, whereas the right brain is linked with things like creativity, including expressing and reading emotions.
The pill is not the only type of contraception to have hit the headlines lately. Spanish researchers writing in The Lancet Oncology journal recently claimed the contraceptive interuterine device (IUD) – more commonly known as the coil – could protect women against cervical cancer, a disease diagnosed in around 2,800 women every year in this country.
Quite how the coil might work in terms of reducing the risk of cervical cancer isn't clear, but the researchers believe their findings could help experts gain a better understanding of how cervical cancer develops.
If you take the pill, have you noticed any change in the way you think about things? Or do you think the researchers are talking nonsense?
To find out more about the different types of contraception that are available, visit http://www.fpa.org.uk
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