Birth Control Pill: Bad for Your Body! Bad for Your Brain?

It’s been another bad year for the birth control pill. And the news just keeps getting worse. You knew the hormones were bad for your body, but did you know they were bad for your brain?

The birth control pill should be study included fifty healthy women. Twenty-one of those women were on birth control pills. When they gave the women MRIs, they found that taking oral contraceptives is associated with dramatically smaller hypothalamuses. According to the researchers, this is the first time that the shrinkage of this area of the brain has been proven. The hypothalamus plays a role in hormone production, sexual drive, appetite, body temperature, sleep and heart rate. It also plays a role in regulating emotional responses and mood, perhaps explaining how the pill can make you angry and depressed.

This study adds to the evidence that the birth control pill increases your risk of depression and adds anger to the pill’s emotional effects. For the first time, it also shows that oral contraceptives significantly shrink the hypothalamus region of the brain.

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