Contraceptive pills can make women brainier?
Ladies, please note — popping the pill not only saves you from an unwanted pregnancy but can also make you brainier, for a study claims that contraceptives help swell grey matter needed for social skills and memory.
Researchers at Salzburg University in Austria have found that contraceptive pills increase the size of certain parts of women’s brains, improving memory and social skills, and enhancing the mind’s “conversation hub”.
The study found that the contraceptive of choice of 3.5 million British women — a quarter of all 16 to 49-year-olds — increases brain size by around 3 per cent, which led to improvement in brain function, the Daily Mail reported.
In fact, for the study, the researchers took high-resolution images of the brains of women taking the pill and those not taking it.
The women not on the contraceptive were scanned more than once to account for the hormonal fluctuations that occur over the course of a month. Several areas of the brains of the women taking the pill were larger than the brains of those not taking the contraceptive, the findings revealed.
No matter which brand or formulation of the drug, or how long it had been prescribed for, the results were same.
Dr Belinda Pletzer, who led the study, said the sex hormones in the pill were clearly having a “tremendous effect” on the female brain.
She added: “Larger volumes of a brain area could lead to an improvement of the functions this area is responsible for. Looking at the brain areas involved in our study, which are larger in pill users compared to naturally cycling women, this could concern several higher order brain functions, especially memory and verbal skills.
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