Effects of hormonal contraceptives on brain and behavior

Hormonal contraceptives have been on the market for more than 50 years now and are used by 150 million women worldwide. However, despite extensive research on health risks and emotional side effects, the effects of hormonal contraceptives on brain and cognition have widely been ignored. The few studies available on this topic mostly suffer from small sample sizes and insufficient study designs which limits their explanatory power. Nevertheless they have attracted considerable public interest demonstrating that women around the globe want to know what happens to their brains while taking the pill. Therefore, this project seeks for the first time to study the effects of hormonal contraceptives on brain and behavior systematically. The first period of this project will be dedicated towards identifying the changes caused by hormonal contraceptives. In particular, we seek to understand, which brain areas are affected, whether the changes in the brain can be directly related to observable changes in behavior, whether the changes differ between different types of hormonal contraceptives and most importantly how hormonal contraceptives affect the brain during sensitive periods of brain development, such as during puberty. Brain structure and function will be assessed in several groups of hormonal contraceptive users at multiple time-points before, during and after they are taking hormonal contraceptives with advanced neuroimaging methods.