Bitesize Biohacks The Female Brain on Birth Control – What You Need to Know

5:35AM Nov 25, 2022

Speakers:

Angela Foster

Intro

Dr Sarah E Hill

Keywords:

hormonal birth control

adolescence

angela

brain

women

diagnosed

sex hormones

chaga

drink

prescribed

uk

depressive disorder

lion

major depressive disorder

developing

mane

foster

genius

chocolatey

health

There's not a doubt in my mind that women who take hormonal birth control during adolescence have different brains than girls who do not take hormonal birth control during adolescence, it would be impossible for it not to

welcome to the high performance health podcast with your host, Angela Foster, the show where we talk about everything you need to break through limits and achieve a high performance, mind, body and lifestyle.

I think that it is important for women to at least understand that this is a possibility. Because how many of us, you know, I have cluding myself, they how many of us were on hormonal birth control during times in our life where we absolutely didn't need to be. But it just was, like, easy to just keep on going. And I think women should know that it's possible that it can influence their partner preferences, because if they are single, and looking for a long term partner, and they don't need to be on hormonal birth control for any other, you know, for any real reason, if they're not sexually active, they might want to take a break from it, you know, and let their natural hormones do their partner picking.

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Yeah, no, I think that this whole I think the idea of giving hormonal birth control to girls prior, you know, like during adolescence prior to the time that their brain is done developing without any research on the long term effects of this is criminal. I mean, I really do because when we think about the fact that, you know, puberty and the post In the whole post pubertal brain development that goes on in brain development explodes during the pubertal transition. I mean, if you think about who you are as a child, and who you are as an adult, all of that, you know, Are these like post pubertal, brain changes, and those are all being coordinated by your sex hormones, it's purely for God's sake, you know. And so the idea that, you know, we're taking like these, our body for millions of years was getting these hormonal messages that, you know, regularly go on in the body, and are coordinating all of these brain changes that are going on and laying down the groundwork, the biological groundwork for our adult brain and our adult body. And to interrupt that, and suppress it with hormonal birth control and replace it with this daily message of, you know, these synthetics, we don't know what that's doing. We don't know how that's influencing the organisation of the brain. And there is research now that's coming out. That suggests that if you take hormonal birth control during adolescence, and generally this is looked at, in women, 19, and younger, we usually define, you know, adolescence as anywhere during the, you know, sort of 11 to 19 phase. It's during this pubertal transition, basically, the movement from childhood to adulthood. If you take hormonal birth control during that time, in the study that I'm referring to, right now, I believe that they isolated it in women 15 to 19. Oh, no, they didn't know I'm thinking about the Danish study. Now, this was just adolescent women generally, so 19 younger, and they looked at the risk of being diagnosed with major depressive disorder at some point later on in your life. And so they looked in this was a very large sample size. And so they compared the probability of being a being diagnosed with major depressive disorder based on whether you took hormonal birth control during adolescence or not. And what they found was that those who were prescribed hormonal, or took hormonal birth control during adolescence, were at a greater risk for major depressive disorder over the course of their lifetime, even if they were no longer on hormonal birth control. And what this is telling us is that, you know, it's this isn't this is a cross sectional study, right? So it is it was longitudinal research. So this is following girls over time, which is always, you know, sort of better than than simple cross sectional research, but it wasn't an experiment. So we cannot determine that taking hormonal birth control during adolescence causes major depressive disorder, you know, risk over the lifetime. We can't say that for but there's definitely a pretty there's a pretty suspicious looking association between those variables, because the researchers did a really nice job of of the way that they modelled their statistics to help account for alternative explanations for their results. But the results seem to suggest that yes, kill use during adolescence may increase your risk of developing a depressive disorders across a period of your lifetime, even after you go off of it. Which, you know, to me seems not at all surprising, when we consider the fact that sex hormones play a really critical role in post pubertal brain development, and there's absolutely no way that it doesn't change the brain during this time.

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