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American Morning

Lot of New Ways to Prevent Pregnancy

Aired July 25, 2002 - 08:31   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: There are already many contraceptives out there, yet sixty percent of all pregnancies in America are mistimed or unwanted. Now there are a whole lot of new ways to prevent pregnancy.

Medical correspondent Rea Blakey joins us from Washington to talk about some of these products on the market.

Good morning, Rea.

REA BLAKEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Paula. Some 70 percent of women in the age group of 25 to 34 use contraceptives. That's 38 million American women. The vast majority, a third, use the pill. Some women use condoms. Both male and female. There's are spermicides and other things available, most of those temporary. There is also permanent birth control, 700,000 tubal ligations a year in the United States, and That's an invasive surgery. It calls for a general anesthesia. There's a recovery time associated. Also, men are chipping in, 300,000 vasectomies.

I want to show some of the latest in birth control. First and foremost, this is called Evra. This is the very first birth control patch, comes in a package like this. You get three of them. It delivers estrogen and progestin through the skin into the bloodstream, and you would simply apply that to your arm, your buttocks, your abdomen, anywhere but the breast, because of the hormones involved. You change this every week on the same day for three weeks. And then On the fourth week, that would be the week you'd be ovulating.

I want to take a look at a little animation to give you a sense of what happens when birth control is actually affecting the body. The ovulation process. Obviously, the ovaries release an egg into the fallopian tubes. That travels into the uterus waiting to be fertilized. Now with these combination hormones, namely estrogen and progestin, ovulation is suppressed.

So here you're looking at a ring there, just at the base of the vaginal canal. That's called the NuvaRing, and that essentially is a small, plastic device that a woman would insert herself, that would provide a woman with birth control for a month. Really, it's three weeks, and then you have one week off where ordinarily you would be having a period.

But this is something a woman can do herself. It's only available by prescription, and it doesn't need to be positioned in a certain location. It just needs to be inserted. And there again, the hormones will release. Now, this is not a fertility -- a contraceptive in particular, but it's a fertility kit for people who don't want to use hormones and just want to keep track of their ovulation cycle, and maybe even people who are trying to get pregnant, but you would not use this Luna fertility kit necessarily as a contraceptive.

The interestingly thing is --I'm going to reach right in here, this little device, you would actually put saliva on that. It's a miniature microscope. And based on the results of your dry saliva, you would know whether or not you were ovulating, and that has to do with the salt content located with increased estrogen in the body.

Now I want to show you one other item here. This one, extremely small. This, you would have to have a surgeon insert. Maybe I should hold it right down here. That little item is actually called Assure, and it would go inside the fallopian tubes. It looks like a spring inside those old pens we used to have. You click the pen, and there's a spring inside, and I know it's difficult to see. And then what happens, is tissue would actually attach to this. This is a permanent birth control device. This would be for women who would consider an alternative to tubal ligation. So this is something that you would have to implant, but the good news there is you would not have to have a general anesthetic. It's already on the market in a number of countries. And basically, that's a 15, 45-minute procedure, women returns to normal activities the next day.

So there are a lot of different options out there, Paula, for people who want to change up from the basic that we're all very familiar with..

ZAHN: And what are some of the risks associated with these new products?

BLAKEY: In particular, you should know that the hormonal products actually do have some health benefits, because they are a low-dose combination contraceptive that you only want to take for a limited time They can reduce the risk of ovarian cancer, of uterine cancer, colorectal cancer. Of course, if you are a had a smoker, that's a problem. You don't to take any hormonal products, because you're at greater risk for heart disease or stroke, so those are two things to keep in mind.

ZAHN: Yes, but when you talk about these hormonal problems, and you think of all these women who are taking these products for menopause, and then found out many years later that they were in fact making themselves very sick indeed. What are the chances studies are going to show 10 years down the road that in fact these health benefits they think don't exist may not exist after all?

BLAKEY: I take your point. And that was one of those situations, where a lot of people assumed that the information was going to turn out one way, and we found that anything really over a four-year period might in fact put women at greater risk, and those studies were in fact stopped. At this point, we don't have any evidence that this material would actually cause a problem, but again, the severe warning for smokers, don't want smokers to be on hormonal products like these.

ZAHN: All right, Rea Blakey, thanks so much. Appreciate that update.

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