Lybrel: Birth control pill eliminates periods

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/lybrel/DI00086

What happened? The Food and Drug Administration approved Lybrel, a new continuous-use birth control pill designed to eliminate menstrual periods for as long as a woman takes it.

The usual regimen for birth control pills is to take an active hormone pill once a day for 21 days, followed by taking an inactive pill once a day for seven days. During the hormone-free week, you get your period. Lybrel, on the other hand, is designed to be taken continuously, once a day for 365 days, with no break for hormone-free intervals. The pill contains low doses of a synthetic progesterone (levonorgestrel) and estrogen (ethinyl estradiol).

What does this mean to you? Continuous-use birth control pills relieve bothersome signs and symptoms of menstruation for some women, so the pills may be particularly welcome if you often experience severe pain, heavy bleeding or emotional problems during your periods. However, some women did experience irregular vaginal bleeding while taking Lybrel, so know that this might be a possibility for you too. Lybrel doesn’t protect against sexually transmitted diseases.

Stopping menstruation with continuous-use birth control pills doesn’t appear to have any greater risk of side effects than regular birth control

appear to have any greater risk of side effects than regular birth control pills. In a clinical study, Lybrel was found to be as safe and as effective as birth control pills in standard hormone and placebo regimens. In some cases, it took several months for women taking Lybrel to achieve amenorrhea — absence of menstrual periods. The longer a woman took Lybrel, the greater her chances of having no periods. A subset of women had higher incidences of unexpected vaginal bleeding throughout the study, regardless of how long they continued with the birth control regimen.

Many women find the monthly bleeding associated with traditional birth control pills a reassuring sign that they’re not pregnant. If you’re like these women, you might find it troubling not to have periods. The failure rate for all birth control pills is very small, but it’s not zero. If you’re interested in trying a continuous-use birth control pill, ask your doctor if Lybrel might be right for you.

From Dr. Grace:

Stuff like this really concerns me in that nature is never one to be ignored, or denied. The female body is designed for developing and harboring life, and when fertilization does not occur, we bleed. We, as women, also have a very delicate, intricate, and necssary hormonal cycle that is associated with menstruation, that time has shown, is agressive on creating disease states if it is exceedingly messed with, like this drug does.

Twenty years ago, women were given hormone replacement therapy to eliminate pesky menopausal symptoms. Now, multiple studies in accredited, peer-reviewed journals have shown an alarming, exponential increase in breast and uterine cancer as a direct result of the “therapy.” So much so, that medical science has turned it’s back on the thought of doing hormone replacement and even said “Oops, that was kind of a bad idea, let’s not prescribe this to women anymore,” and are now investing in actually learning what hormones are most affected in menopause. In fact, alternative methods now tend to be the most effective aid for menopause symptomatology, so MD’s are being forced to learn how to use herbal remedies to reduce the uncomfortable side effects, without altering a woman’s natural progression through the life cycle, which ultimately prolongs her natural, disease-free state of being, as well.

My advice with taking a drug that makes you stop having a period all together: Think twice, and wait. Wait for research to come out that isn’t subsidized by the company creating the drug (clearly biased), and wait for the social backlash of side effects - they will exist, but to what degree, and extent is yet unknown if time has not passed long enough to tell. For the women close to me in my life, I’d say don’t do it… I’d rather not see you be one of the statistics that makes the medical science community say “Oops, we shouldn’t have done that.”

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 6:34 pm and is filed under Women's Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.