Hundreds of women in the UK are considering legal steps about the fear that a commonly used contraception-jab will have given the risk of a potentially fatal brain tumor.
NHS data suggest that there are approximately 10,000 recipes for Medroxyprogesterone acetate – known under the brand name Depo Provera – which was published in England every month.
However, a 2024 study in the British Medical Journal showed that women who used it for more than a year were five times more likely to undergo an meningioma, the most common type of tumor in the brain.
An estimated 3,240 people per year in the UK are diagnosed with the disorder.
The British drug safety Waakhond – the regulatory authority of medicines and health care – last October October the manufacturer of the JAB, the global pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, called on to include a warning about the increased risk in patient information.
Pfizer also wrote to NHS doctors who encouraged them to stop women immediately to use Depo Provera if an meningioma was diagnosed with them.
The drug is giving a hormone injection every three months and works by preventing eggs from being released by a woman’s ovaries.
It was first licenseed for use on the NHS as a contraceptive more than 40 years ago.
There are around 10,000 recipes for contraception injection (medical medical known as a medroxyprogesterone acetate) every month, according to NHS data
But the BMJ study, by a team of scientists from the French National Agency for Medicines and Safety of Health Products, raised an alarm about the safety of the JAB.
It analyzed data about more than 18,000 women in France who underwent an operation for meningioma between 2009 and 2018.
Although non-cancer-like, the condition can see blurry, headache, hearing loss, poor sense of smell and problems with swallowing. Tumors are normally slow, but can kill by compressing the brain and nerves if they become too large.
Meniomas develop in the opinions, the membrane that comes outside the brain and occurs more often in women.
The French study showed that although the figures that the meningioma developed during the use of the JAB were still small, they were considerably higher than in women who were not on it.
Such an increase in the risk was not found with other hormonal contraceptives – such as the pill.
Around 400 women in the US have so far joined a Class Action against Pfizer and other generic manufacturers of the JAB, claiming that they were aware of the link, but users cannot sufficiently warn about the risks or promote safer alternatives.
All women developed meningiomas after the use of Depo Provera for at least one year.
The proportion of women who take oral contraceptives has fallen by more than two-thirds, from 420,600 in 2012/13 to 126,400 in 2022/23, according to the NHS data
A hearing in the case will take place later this week in Florida, in which a judge is expected to explain a timeline for future procedures.
“This case is moving at speed and this hearing brings us closer to achieving justice for women who have never been warned about the increased risk of developing a brain tumor,” said Virginia Buchanan, partner at Levin Papantonio, the law firm that deals with the case in the US.
A leading British medical-legal expert, who asked for not being identified, said that his company has been approached in recent months by around 200 women who feared that the contraception JAB was the fault of their meningioma diagnosis, whether she had brought an increased risk of one.
It is not yet clear whether there will be a British Class Action that is comparable to that in the US, because Great Britain has a more limiting approach to group-based process matters.
However, individual lawsuits are a possibility, the expert said.
Dr. Alemie Rowland, a general practitioner who led the French study on ties with brain tumors, said that women on the shot should regularly have scans to see if they had growth that developed.
“Neurological monitoring must be the rule in patients older than 40 years to detect an meningioma as quickly as possible,” she said.
Pfizer UK said it was unable to comment.
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