UQAM study suggests link between anxiety and contraceptive pill

The results of a laboratory study conducted by UQAM suggest a link between anxiety and taking the contraceptive pill. Even more surprisingly, this association appears to persist in women who stopped taking the pill more than a year ago.

The results do not demonstrate a cause-and-effect relationship; they show correlations, emphasizes Lisa-Marie Davignon, a doctoral student in psychology and lead author of the study. “I’m being cautious because I don’t want to worry people unnecessarily. I think it’s a topic worth discussing and that raises awareness about women’s health, but my goal isn’t to alarm anyone, just to open up the discussion,” she says.

Women are twice as likely as men to experience anxiety disorders. Furthermore, research shows that certain variables, such as sex hormones, may contribute to anxiety. Davignon therefore wanted to explore the link between the contraceptive pill (which contains sex hormones) and fear, the predominant emotion in anxiety disorders.

During the experiment, participants were exposed to images of an office and a library. In one of the two settings, participants repeatedly received a small electric shock. “After a while, the women learned to fear this setting because they anticipated receiving an electric shock. In parallel, there was a second setting that was never associated with an electric shock, which was therefore a safe setting,” explains Davignon.

“The day after the experiment, the participants returned to the laboratory and were re-exposed to the two contexts,” she continued. “In the dangerous context, everyone was afraid; everyone understood that it was a context associated with shock. But in the safe context, the fear responses differed depending on the use of contraception.”

In a context where fear is not expected, women taking the pill exhibited higher fear responses than women who had never taken the pill. “And even women who had stopped taking the pill a long time ago also had heightened fear responses in these safe situations within our laboratory protocol,” notes Davignon.

Not enough studies 65 years after the pill

To measure fear, she used a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine that recorded the brain activity of participants throughout the experiment. The results were interesting regarding the activity of the hippocampus, a small region in the brain that is very important for memory “and which is known in the scientific literature to be one of the regions most sensitive to the effect of hormones.”

“We noticed that this region was more activated in women who had never taken the pill in their lives,” says Davignon. “As a potential explanation, but this remains to be explored, perhaps this increased activation in girls who haven’t taken the pill may have been beneficial to them.”

The participants also had sensors in the palms of their hands to measure perspiration, a measurement that indicates that the nervous system has been activated. “Still in the context of safety, women who had stopped taking the pill a long time ago had fear reactions as high as those of women who were still taking the pill,” the doctoral student noted.

The study sample consisted of 147 participants divided into four groups: women taking the pill; women who had stopped using the pill more than a year prior; women who had never taken the pill; and men. This is a standard sample size for this type of study, given that participants had to be in excellent physical and psychological health and that the data collection protocols were costly.

Davignon believes the results support the need for further research to better understand the effects of hormonal contraception on mental health. “We know that women have historically been significantly understudied compared to men. It’s still absurd, in my opinion, that it’s been 65 years since the first pills were marketed and we’re only now beginning to realize that there are potentially correlations with mental health,” she laments. The next step would be to conduct randomized controlled trials.

—The Canadian Press’s health coverage is supported by a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. The Canadian Press is solely responsible for this journalistic content.

–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews