Researchers led by Dr. Thomas Inge at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus wanted to know whether it’s better or safer to have it in mid-life, the most common time now, or sooner before many of those other health problems appear or do much harm.
"It's possible the relationship goes in "both directions" -- with loneliness and health issues feeding each other, added Mullen, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine."
In the paper, researchers at the University of Colorado School of Medicine say that around 5 percent of women carry a gene that makes their bodies produce an enzyme that breaks down the hormones in birth control faster than usual.
"If a woman came in and said she was taking birth control and got pregnant we assumed she did something wrong, missed a pill or wasn't using the method like she was supposed to," said the study's lead author, Dr. Aaron Lazorwitz of the University of Colorado School of Medicine. "We need to believe the patient and to understand that there are other things outside of her control, like genetics, that could cause birth control to fail."
CU Anschutz researchers found that choline can help expecting women protect the brains of their unborn children from problems caused by the flu and other viruses in the mother.
"The kind of historic viewpoint has been that they must have missed the pill; they must have done something wrong," he said. That explanation wasn't good enough for him: "I started talking with a pharmacogeneticist at the University of Colorado and came upon this fascinating area that hadn't yet been applied really to women's health care or at all to birth control."
"When a woman says she got pregnant while on birth control, the assumption was always that it was somehow her fault," study lead author Dr. Aaron Lazorwitz, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver said in a statement. "But these findings show that we should listen to our patients and consider if there is something in their genes that caused this [unplanned pregnancy]."
'We have been using these hormones for decades now, but we need to start looking at: how do these work for the women we're giving them to?' Dr Lazorwitz, MD, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at University of Colorado Anschutz Medical, told DailyMail.com."
