It has happened many times: a drug designed for one purpose ends up being useful against a different problem, unexpectedly. This was the case, for example, with viagra. The biopharmaceutical company Pfizer developed a drug to treat angina that proved ineffective, but the men who took it refused to stop because it turned out to be the best remedy for erectile dysfunction. The famous and lucrative blue pill was born.
Scientists sometimes suspect that some products have unexpected consequences on health and rush to investigate them, to see if they find another viagra. The latest example of this type is found in a study by the Karolinska Institute (Sweden), which has found that women who take oral contraceptives (“the pill”, hereinafter) for seven years or more have a 19% lower chance of having rheumatoid arthritis in the future.
A disease without a cure
The researchers suspect that the hormonal changes caused by the consumption of the pill are responsible for this unexpected beneficial effect, which occurs not only in women who take the contraceptive. Those who have consumed it for years and have already stopped doing so are 13% less likely to suffer from this chronic autoimmune and incurable inflammatory condition that causes pain, swelling and stiffness in the joints, and that only affects 230,000 people in Spain, most of them women.
The finding could open up new avenues of research in the fight against rheumatoid arthritis , which usually appears between 40 and 50 years of age and which, as it progresses, causes a significant deterioration in the quality of life and great physical limitations. According to a study carried out by the Spanish Society of Rheumatology, in our country the global annual cost of patients with this disease (due to sick leave, treatments …) reaches 1,120 million euros.
The protective pill
Swedish specialists compared the medical records of 2,809 women with rheumatoid arthritis with those of 5,312 women randomly selected from the rest of the population.
They found that those who had taken oral contraceptives at some point in their lives had a lower risk of this autoimmune disease than those who had never done so. And that among those who consumed them at the time of the investigation, the danger was 15% lower.
But why does taking the pill protect? The authors of the work admit not knowing it and point out the need for further research to discover the biological mechanisms underlying this phenomenon.
The key could be in the hormonal changes caused by contraceptive pills, which are made with minimal doses of two hormones – estrogen and progesterone – whose function is to prevent the maturation of the eggs or the sperm from reaching the egg and fertilizing it.
Researchers at the Karolinska Institute have also studied whether breastfeeding protects against rheumatoid arthritis, something that has been suspected for years, but they have found no link between this practice and a lower risk of suffering from the disease.
