Text Size:

August 23, 2010

16-year-old Katie Anderson was attracted to the advertisements for the birth control pill Yaz — little did she know it would leave her fighting for her life. In a recent report from NPR.org, Anderson says that within one month of starting the pill, she began having persistent leg pains. "I started developing this kind of pinching, twinging, numbing kind of feeling in my left butt cheek," she said.

A couple of weeks later, she was awakened with terrible chest pain. Katie's mother, Beth Anderson, recalls that her daughter "woke up about 5 o'clock in the morning" and couldn't move, couldn't talk." Beth took her daughter to the hospital, where the doctor diagnosed Katie with pleurisy, "an inflammation of the chest lining that isn't serious," and prescribed Motrin.

Over the next few days, Katie developed shortness of breath, and her left leg went totally numb and cold. "My left leg was completely purple," she tells NPR. What Katie didn't know was that an enormous blood clot had formed in her leg, and a piece of it had broken off and lodged in her lung, resulting in a life-threatening pulmonary embolism.

Beth says that once in the ER, "the doctor came in and he took one look at Katie's cold, blue leg, and he said, 'Wow! That's a big blood clot! You're on birth control, aren't you?'"

Katie's story was used to illustrate the link between birth control pills and blood clots. "Every year, a few thousand U.S. women suffer clots because they're on the pill," according to the report, and new studies suggest that the brand of birth controls, Yaz and Yasmin, carry a higher than usual risk of clotting than other oral contraceptives.

But perhaps the lesser known, and more shocking, reality is that some women have a much higher risk of clotting and death when they take birth control pills — and most don't know they're at risk. Katie, like 1 in 5 Caucasian women, has a "superclotting" gene called "Factor V Leiden," which makes it 35 times more likely to develop a blood clot when she takes any oral contraceptive.

Factor V Leiden is not routinely tested for, and many doctors are not even aware of a conflict. "Both Katie and I assumed that since she was well under 35, she wasn't overweight, and she had never smoked, that it would be safe," Beth says. "We assumed wrong."

Comments / Post a comment