A very important study was just published in JAMA Psychiatry that looked at the health information of over a million Danish women between the ages of 15 - 34. Denmark has a registry including all women living in Denmark. It's an astounding source of information. They cross referenced those women who had been prescribed contraceptives with a registry of all prescriptions for anti-depressants and women admitted to a psychiatric hospital with a diagnosis of depression.
After working with the stats they concluded that women who had been placed on a contraceptive containing hormones were more likely to have developed depression. Younger women were at a higher risk than older women. What are we to take away from this study?
The first point is that this is an observational study and so while there may be an association between hormonal contraception and depression this study can't prove that the pill caused the depression. We've discussed this before. There could be other factors associated with contraception that are the real cause for the depression. Having said that this adds to a growing body of evidence that there is a connection between the two.
So should we not prescribe the pill?
That would be an exaggeration of what this data tells us. Instead we need to do two things:
So, should we stop using the birth control pill? No, but we need to be careful about how we use it especially in adolescents and younger women.