Listen up ladies! Women who take oral contraceptives, particularly those who recently started the pills, may be at risk of developing lupus according to a new study conducted by the Centre for Clinical Epidemiology at Jewish General Hospital of McGill University in Montreal.
For the study, researchers gathered the medical records of 1.7 million women. All had prescriptions for birth control. Eight years later, 786 women in the study developed lupus. When the researchers compared study participants with 10 women who didn’t have the disease, they found that birth control pills were associated with a 1.5-fold increased risk of lupus. The risk is even higher during the first three months of oral contraceptives use.
Currently, lupus affects 1 million to 1.5 million Americans, 90 percent of them women. Furthermore, African-American women are three times as likely as white women to get lupus.
Learn more about lupus here.
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