Advance notice - latest pill scare!!!

You may have been watching the Royal Wedding on Friday but I was reading my BMJ and there were a couple of interesting papers about the risks of DVT for women who take the combined contraceptive pill. One of the papers used data from the UK GP Research Database - they had a database of 318,825 women aged between 15 and 44.

They found that women taking contraceptive pills containing drospirenole (brand name Yasmin) had nearly a two and half times the risk of having a DVT compared with women taking contraceptive pills containing levonorgestrol (like Microgynon or Logynon). Of course when you unpick the statistics the numbers are not so scary - the risk of DVT for women taking pills containing levonorgestrol was 9 per 100,000 compared to 23 per 100,000 for women taking pills containing drospirenole - only a very small increase in absolute numeric terms. And the advice to women taking Yasmin who might be concerned is not to stop but to make a routine appointment and come and talk to your doctor or nurse about.

To read more click here to go to the online pages in the BMJ. Usually pill scares like this would be front page news, but with the Royal Wedding I have not seen anything in the press about this.

Was it a good day to bury bad news?

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