ArticlePerspectives on sexual and reproductive health2025
Exploring the Relationship Between Medicine Related Beliefs and Side-Effect Experience Among White Oral Contraceptive Users in the UK.
Article in Perspectives on sexual and reproductive health, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Contraception-Related Posts from Adolescents, Young Adults, and Caregivers on Reddit: A Qualitative Content Analysis.Journal of pediatric and adolescent gynecology · 2026Article
- Misinformation and women's health: Rebuilding trust in evidence-based care.International journal of gynaecology and obstetrics: the official organ of the International Federation of Gynaecology and Obstetrics · 2026Article
- Hormonal contraception and mental health: a narrative review of screening, monitoring, and patient-centered care for family physicians.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Review
- Missing from the data, missing from the design: feminist co-design for equitable hormonal contraception symptom tracking.Frontiers in global women's health · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectivesSide-effects are often central to the decision to discontinue oral contraceptives. However, many oral contraceptive side-effects may be the result of a psychological nocebo effect. In this preliminary study, we investigate whether correlates of nocebo effects are associated with oral contraceptive side-effect experience.
designAn exploratory online cross-sectional survey of 275 female, predominantly young, White respondents was conducted. Associations between psychological factors previously implicated in nocebo responses (beliefs about medicines, perceived sensitivity to medicines, side-effect expectations, medicine information seeking, anxiety and trust in medicines), and oral contraceptive side-effect experience were assessed using regression analyses.
resultsIncreased side-effect expectations, stronger beliefs that medicines cause harm and are overused, increased perceived sensitivity to medicines, and decreased trust in medicine development were associated with increased attribution of symptoms to the oral contraceptive. Higher side-effect attribution scores were also associated with discontinued oral contraceptive use.
conclusionThese 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.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.