Do the Pills Cause Cancer?

Are the 3,000,000 or more U.S. women who are taking birth-control pills running an increased risk of developing cancer? Doctors at last week's A.M.A. meeting had a double reason for supplying answers. Many of them have been prescribing the pills for years, and it was an A.M.A. publication that unintentionally started the latest cancer scare. The consensus was more than reassuring: women who take oral contraceptives do not incur any added risk of cancer, said the experts, and there are even glimmers of hopeful though preliminary evidence that the pills may actually be protective against some forms of the disease.

What They Meant. The trouble began with a brief abstract in the A.M.A. Journal of a report on work done by a University of Oregon team of researchers. Delivered in San Francisco, the detailed paper described experiments done on a particular and unusual form of cancer in a particular strain of laboratory rats. Like some human cancers, this one will grow faster if the animals are given certain hormones, and will all but disappear under doses of other hormones.

The Oregon researchers wanted to find out whether hormones tagged with a radioactive phosphorus compound would concentrate in the cancers to effect a faster cure. But first they had to make the cancers grow lustily, and this they did by giving the rats a variety of hormones. Among them were progestin and an estrogen, hormones which are combined in G. D. Searle & Co.'s famed Enovid (pronounced En-ah-vid) contraceptive pills.

By the time the Oregon team got to San Francisco to give their full report, any medical significance of their work had been overshadowed by such screaming headlines as the Miami News's eight-column two-liner:

REPORT TO A.M.A. STIRS FUROR BIRTH PILL STOCKS TUMBLE

Dr. J. Englebert Dunphy, the university's chief of surgery, had to spend all his time explaining what his researchers had not meant to do, rather than what they accomplished--which was to satisfy themselves that hormones combined with radioactive phosphorus would slow or stop the growth of some rat tumors.

What's to Be Learned. "Millions of people are taking these drugs for good reason, and to discontinue their use arbitrarily would cause untold hardship, if not outright tragedy," said Dr. Dunphy. "All of us must be entirely responsible in reporting any information on the subject. Such information must be kept in context and in perspective." To keep the rat studies in perspective, cancer experts reminded their colleagues that rat cancers do not necessarily behave the same as human cancers, and there is even evidence that in some cases they react in a way that is exactly the opposite to human cancers under the same hormone treatment.

Because there is still a doubt as to just what effect pills such as Enovid and its competitors may have on human breast cancer, manufacturers specify that they should not be given to women with this disease. Whether this caution should be modified will be determined soon--not in laboratory rats, not in the stock market, but in the health records of thousands of women who have been taking the pills since 1956.

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