Birth Control and Ovarian Cancer – Can It Reduce the Risks of Aggressive Ovarian Cancer?

“I'm an ovarian cancer epidemiologist. About thirty percent of ovarian cancer patients never really respond to initial treatment, which includes debulking surgery and chemotherapy usually 6 rounds. Surgeons try to get as much [of the cancer] as possible but it’s very difficult. These people have the worst disease you can have,” says lead study author Dr. Kirsten Moysich, Distinguished Professor of Oncology in the Departments of Cancer Prevention and Control and Immunology at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center.

“We asked the question: are risk factors different for women with most aggressive highly fatal disease,” Dr. Moysich continues. “We are pursuing that with many risk factors, but in this study, we looked at contraceptives, which we know decrease risk of ovarian cancer.”

The research also found that the longer women have used birth control pills, the more they can reduce the risk of death from aggressive ovarian cancer. "For every five years of use, we observed 32% lower odds of highly fatal disease, compared to 13% for all ovarian cancer as previously reported by other researchers,” according to first author Jennifer Mongiovi, a graduate student working with Dr. Moysich and also a cancer epidemiology fellow in the Department of Epidemiology and Environmental Health at Buffalo.

The reason oral contraceptives can reduce cancer risk is that they prevent ovulation. “Each time a woman releases an egg, there can be tissue damage, and when there is tissue damage it needs to be repaired. With each repair there is potential for spontaneous mutations. But if you don't ovulate, there is no damage, and that's why we think it's so consistently protective,” says Dr. Moysich.

The study used information from twenty prior studies, which together included 579 patients who died within twelve months of being diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Researchers compared that population with more than two thousand patients who did not have ovarian cancer, to control for outside factors that might have impacted risk but might also be unrelated to contraceptives, such as age and whether patients had given birth. The study also included a group of 1294 patients who died within 18 months of an aggressive ovarian cancer diagnosis. The study compared this group to more than five thousand people who did not have ovarian cancer.

For ovarian cancer at large, oral contraceptives reduce risk, especially in women who have had children, according to Dr. Jonathon Berek, the Laurie Kraus Lacob Professor at Stanford University and the Stanford Cancer Institute, and the director of the Stanford Women’s Cancer Center. “If women have taken the birth control pill for up to five years and have had two children, they may reduce their risk by as much as 70% of getting the most common type of ovarian, fallopian tube cancer,” he says. “If [women] have a choice of what kind of birth control to use, then the oral contraceptive would be the contraceptive of choice to reduce the risk,” says Dr. Berek.

 

 

 

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