A European study shows that women who have been taking the contraceptive pill have been 10 years or more are significantly reducing their risk of developing ovarian cancer. This massive study involving more than half a million people reveals that a woman’s risk of developing ovarian cancer decreases by 45% having taken the pill for such a length of time. The study is published in the British Journal of Cancer and was carried out at the European Prospective Investigation of Cancer (EPIC).
In addition, taking the pill at any stage seems to have an effect on a woman’s likelihood of developing this type of cancer. Women who took the pill for over one year or even a few months had a risk of approximately 28 in every 100,000. These women were compared to women who had never take the pill and whose risk of developing the cancer was approximately 38 in every 100,000.
Women who had become pregnant at some stage in their lives also had a lower incidence of ovarian cancer. There was a 29% disparity in the number of instances of the disease between those who had never become pregnant and those who had at least one full term pregnancy. Furthermore, the more pregnancies one had, the less likely they were to develop ovarian cancer.
EPIC remind us that there is also evidence to suggest that taking the contraceptive pill will increase risk of developing breast cancer but the incidence is low (50 per 100,000 higher than it would have been otherwise).