Healio: FDA Approves First Oral Dissolvable Birth Control Pill
Healio recently featured an expert opinion perspective by Katrina Heyrana, MD, PhD, a staff physician from the Division of Family Planning in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Cedars-Sinai, on the first dissolvable oral birth control pill, which was approved recently by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Heyrana, who is also an assistant professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Cedars-Sinai, said that because the pills—called orally disintegrating tablets, or ODTs—dissolve quickly on the tongue, they have several advantages.
“The most intuitive one is that they provide a way for people who have difficulty swallowing pills to take medications orally,” she wrote in the Healio perspective. “ODTs are also helpful for people who suffer from nausea, as a dissolvable pill can be easier to take than having to swallow a medication whole.
“This can be helpful for birth control pills specifically since some patients can become nauseous due to the medication.”
Heyrana said that although the dissolvable pills are absorbed in the bloodstream more rapidly than medication that is swallowed, one is not more effective than the other.
“Though the different methods can ultimately lead to different levels of estrogen and progestin in the bloodstream, the amount of these hormones that does get absorbed is enough for the pills to reliably prevent pregnancy, regardless of the route of administration,” Heyrana wrote in the Healio article.
Heyrana also cautioned that patients should not chew or crush pills that are not labeled as orally dissolvable because it can cause unwanted side effects or affect how the medication works.
Click here to read the complete article from Healio.