The benefits of taking oral contraceptives may be no match for the risks. According to a study, while contraceptives allow a woman to have intercourse without fear of getting pregnant, they could extinguish her sexual desire ... permanently.

The pill has been linked to a number of side effects, including:

• Migraines
• Blood clots
• Weight gain
• Painful intercourse
• Problems with orgasms

However, the side effect least talked about is its tendency to silence a woman’s libido by decreasing testosterone levels. Contraceptive drugs slow down the production of hormones in the ovaries and raise levels of sex hormone binding globulin (SHBG), a chemical that kills the libido.

And while experts believed any sexual dysfunction from taking oral contraceptives would disappear when a woman stopped using them--that no longer seems to be the case.

Permanent Libido Damage?

Researchers studied 125 young women who visited a sexual dysfunction clinic; half were taking oral contraceptives, 40 had previously taken them and 23 had never been on the pill.

After measuring the participants’ SHBG levels every three months for a year (via blood samples), researchers found:

• Seven times the amount of the libido-killing SHBG hormone was present in woman who took oral contraceptives, compared to women who never used the pill.

• Even though SHBG levels declined in women who had stopped taking the pill, they still remained three to four times higher than they were in women with no history of using oral contraceptives.

New Scientist May 27, 2005