Today in depressing: a widely-used anti-miscarriage drug that didn’t actually work has been found to cause breast cancer, infertility, and a whole mess of other problems in the daughters of women who used it while pregnant. The drug’s crappy effects are so far reaching that researchers also suspect that it may cause reproductive health issues in the granddaughters of women who used it.
The Associated Press reports that the drug, an artificial form of estrogen called DES (diethylstilbestrol), was often prescribed to pregnant women in pill or cream form between 1940 and 1960. When it was discovered that the teenage daughters of women who used it were mysteriously coming down with a rare form of vaginal cancer, the drug was discontinued in 1971. Doctors long suspected the negative effects of the drug, and its cumulative harm will be first documented in research to be published in The New England Journal of Medicine this week.
As suspected, the drug’s disastrous effects are long reaching and devastating. Daughters of DES experience a Murderers’ Row of female health headaches — they’re twice as likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer than non-DES women, nearly twice as likely to have pre-cancerous cervical cells, twice as likely to experience long term infertility, and were three times as likely to experience early menopause. DES daughters who were able to become pregnant were much more likely to experience miscarriage, preterm delivery, high blood pressure during pregnancy, tubal pregnancy, and stillbirth.