There have been several articles in the Globe and Mail recently regarding "designer periods" for women. Barr Pharmaceuticals has developed a birth control pill that will reduce the number of periods that a woman has from 13 per year to 4. Late last year in the United States the drug Seasonale was launched and women have been lining up ever since to get started on it. The Barr company confirms that plans for its Canadian release are in the works. Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, makers of Alesse, plans to release Librel, which eliminates periods altogether, as early as 2006. There is high support from the medical community and their theme is " unless you are trying to get pregnant, periods are unnecessary". Women are told that periods are bad for them, leading to iron deficiency and that the fewer times you ovulate the less the chance of ovarian cancer.

I am here to tell you the other side of the story. There have been no long term studies on the impact of menstrual suppression and fertility. No long term studies have been conducted on the ways in which menstruation suppression may affect the development of young women and no long term studies have been conducted on the effects of exposing women to hormones over a longer period time than regular contraceptive pills. For example Seasonale exposes women to nine more weeks of estrogen and "progestin" every year than a regular birth control pill.

The big case in point is the discovery in the Women's Health Initiative (WHI) study, that women of menopausal age who took hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for decades, were linked to increase risk of strokes, heart attacks, blood clots, cardiovascular disease and breast cancer. HRT contains synthetic estrogens and progestins similar to those found in Seasonale.
History may just be repeating itself 10-15years from now when the studies start rolling in. The side effects of Seasonale are the same as any oral contraceptive pill (OCP). It will decrease the absorption of folic acid and B6 contributing to cervical changes (abnormal PAP smears) and PMS. There is an increase risk of blood clots, increase in blood pressure, strokes and heart attack particularly amongst women who smoke. In fact if you smoke more that 15 cigarettes per day this drug is contraindicated. Nausea, breast tenderness, fluid retention, weight gain, skin discoloration of the face, male patterned hair growth, elevated liver enzymes, breakthrough bleeding, spotting, gallbladder disease and depression are some of the common side effects I have seen in clinical practice.

The other big question is that a woman will not get her period for 3 months and she might be pregnant before she realizes it and is continuing the drug. The effect of the drug on foetuses is not clinically studied, but I can tell you from a functional medicine point of view, that those delicate developing tissues of pregnancy in the first 1-3 months need all the nutrition they can get and folic acid is one of them. How many women who are on any type of OCP's are taking folic acid? There has also been no research on this drug and the health of the bone. It is commonly known, with the use of injectable Depo-Provera as a contraceptive, that the incidence of osteoporosis in young women is greatly increased.

Other side effects include migraine headaches, disturbances in blood sugar metabolism and visual changes. The research seems to point to the bad effect of progestins which are not at all the same as the natural "progesterone" found in the body or used in bio-identical hormone replacement therapy.

Have I convinced you yet? Please talk to the young women in your life about these risks. Wear designer clothes but don't take designer drugs!