Exploring the Relationship Between Medicine Related Beliefs and Side‐Effect Experience Among White Oral Contraceptive Users in the UK

These preliminary findings demonstrate a potential role that nocebo-related factors may have in impacting oral contraceptive side-effect experience. Importantly, these factors are amenable to psychological interventions which could be employed to reduce oral contraceptive side-effect experience and, as a result, unnecessary discontinuation. Future research must first assess such relationships using a prospective design to confirm the direction of the associations identified using more diverse samples of oral contraceptive users to increase the generalisability of findings.