The Impact of Oral Contraceptives on Cognition
-
1
Monash Alfred Psychiatry Research Centre, Australia
BACKGROUND: Oral Contraceptives(OCs) containing estrogen and progesterone analogues (progestins) are the most commonly prescribed medications in young women, but little is known about their cognitive impact. Given evidence to support neurological effects of reproductive hormones, there is a clear rationale for investigation. The existing literature is inconclusive, with some suggestion that different progestins exert impacts across different cognitive domains according to their androgenicity. We aimed to examine the impact of OCs on cognition by comparing cognitive performance between pill phases (‘active’ hormonal vs. placebo ‘sugar’), and between different classes of progestin (old vs. new generation). METHODS: We recruited healthy women taking a variety of OCs to undertake cognitive testing using CogState Research software at two points in the menstrual cycle, coinciding with ‘active’ and ‘sugar’ pills, with order of testing counterbalanced. SPSS statistical software was used to perform repeated measures ANOVAs assessing the effects of pill phase and progestin class. RESULTS: 35 women completed testing. Analysis by pill phase revealed significant improvement in verbal memory during active pills(p=0.03). Analysis by progestin class showed a main effect between groups in visual memory(p< 0.01) and social-emotional cognition(p=0.01), with superior performance by users of older generation progestins in both. An interaction between pill phase and progestin class was seen in verbal learning, where performance improved during the active phase in new progestin users, but conversely declined in old progestin users(p=0.02). CONCLUSION: These results support previous findings that OCs may improve verbal memory, and expand upon the suggestion that different progestin generations have different cognitive impacts according to androgenicity. In this study, older (androgenic) OCs impaired verbal learning (a female-favouring task) and enhanced visual memory and facial emotion recognition (a male-favouring task), with opposite effects seen in users of newer (anti-androgenic) progestins. Establishing the cognitive impact of OCs allows women to make better-informed contraceptive choices.
Keywords:
Cognition,
oral contraceptives,
Hormones,
Estrogens,
Progestins
Conference:
ACNS-2013 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference, Clayton, Melbourne, Australia, 28 Nov - 1 Dec, 2013.
Presentation Type:
Poster
Topic:
Other
Citation:
Warren
AM,
Gurvich
C and
Kulkarni
J
(2013). The Impact of Oral Contraceptives on Cognition.
Conference Abstract:
ACNS-2013 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2013.212.00060
Copyright:
The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers.
They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters.
The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated.
Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed.
For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions.
Received:
15 Oct 2013;
Published Online:
25 Nov 2013.
*
Correspondence:
Ms. Annabelle M Warren, Monash Alfred Psychiatry Research Centre, Melbourne, Australia, annabelle.warren@monash.edu