Oral Contraceptives, Pregnancy, and the Veins

ORAL CONTRACEPTIVES must be counted as one of the important new discoveries of this decade.The value of this discovery ranges from the convenience of the individual to the control of an expanding population.Among the disadvantages of the use of these agents, long-term effect on the peripheral veins is one of the most contro- versial.The intent of this editorial is to bring out ideas concerning possible relationships between oral contraceptive drugs and dis- orders of the veins.The initial source of concern for the pos- sibility that oral contraceptives and venous thrombosis were causally related came from case reports of association between the two events.Studies that followed of large groups of women were not definitive until the most recent investigations conducted by the British Medical Research Council.These data show that the risk of thrombophlebitis is increased for women receiving these contraceptive drugs.1 2 This finding suggests the need for evaluation of other kinds of experimental data that would examine the concept of a cause and effect relationship between the use of oral contraceptive drugs and venous throm- bosis.An independent approach to this problem was that of attempting to determine if the