Common Drug Remodels Brain Structure and Activity

What if you learned that a drug you'd been routinely (put optionally) taking caused physical changes to your brain, modified how your brain operated, and that these changes were permanent? What if, when you wisely asked, "What is the effect of these changes?" you're told, "No one knows."

Now that would be scary, I'd think. Scientific American reports:

It seems that weekly we hear about some professional athlete who sullies himself and his sport through abuse of steroids. The melodrama unfolds, careers and statistics are brought low and asterisked, and everyone bemoans another fallen competitor. Yet there are millions of cases of steroid use that occur daily with barely a second thought: Millions of women take birth control pills, blithely unaware that their effects may be subtly seeping into and modulating brain structure and activity.

It is a huge experiment whose resolution will not be known for a while, but a new study in the journal Brain Research demonstrates that the effects are likely to be dramatic. It found that birth control pills have structural effects on regions of the brain that govern higher-order cognitive activities, suggesting that a woman on birth control pills may literally not be herself -- or is herself, on steroids.