Depo Provera may cause memory impairment

The birth control shot has been a great advance for women who have a hard time remembering to take a pill every day. Ironically, the shot may be causing memory failure.

New research from ASU’s Bimonte-Nelson Memory and Aging Laboratory has connected medroxyprogesterone acetate (MPA), the hormone active in birth control shot Depo Provera, to memory loss. MPA is also used in many menopause hormone therapies which could compound the memory issues traditionally associated with menopause and aging generally.

Psychology doctoral student Blair Braden and Heather Bimonte-Nelson, associate professor of psychology ion the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and director of the Bimonte-Nelson Memory and Aging Lab, led the study. Their lab first linked MPA to memory loss in rats while studying menopause hormone therapies. This new study was designed to examine what the same hormone, MPA, does in the birth control shots.

“Does it have the same memory-impairing effects if someone takes it as birth control, when they are a younger age?” asks Braden. Bimonte-Nelson continued, “This is an important question, because what we are going to have in our future are women who are menopausal that also have a history of taking MPA as birth control when they were younger.”

After watching three sets of rats - one with MPA as a young rat, one with MPA as post-menopausal rat and a third control group – they discovered that the effects were alarming.

“What we found was pretty shocking – animals that had been given the drug at any point in their life were memory impaired at middle age compared to animals that never had the drug. We also confirmed that in the subjects that only received the drug when young, the hormone was no longer circulating during memory testing when older showing it had cleared form the system yet still had effects on the brain,” explained Braden.

The next tests will use human participants.

Source: ScienceDaily, Neurobiology of Learning and Memory