Word: progestins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Until now, U.S. pills have relied on a synthetic progestin, akin to but more powerful than natural progesterone, to prevent ovulation by spreading its abundance over 20 days in mid-cycle. Only a minute quantity of estrogen was put in the same pill to reduce side effects. But as long as 20 years ago, Boston's Dr. Fuller Albright pointed out that a high level of estrogens in the first two-thirds of the cycle would prevent ovulation. To him, this indicated a practicable method of contraception...
...Oregon researchers wanted to find out whether hormones tagged with a radioactive phosphorus compound would concentrate in the cancers to effect a faster cure. But first they had to make the cancers grow lustily, and this they did by giving the rats a variety of hormones. Among them were progestin and an estrogen, hormones which are combined in G. D. Searle & Co.'s famed Enovid (pronounced En-ah-vid) contraceptive pills...
...pills work, in effect, by fooling the body into behaving as though ovulation has taken place when it actually has not. On the fifth day of her cycle, when a woman's system would normally be building up hormones to promote ovulation, she takes the first of her progestin pills, and she takes one daily for the next 20 or 21 days. By some biochemical magic not yet understood, the progestin makes it impossible for a follicle to ripen and spill out an ovum. It also prepares the lining of the uterus for menstruation. By the 25th or 26th...
Split Schedule. All the oral contraceptives so far approved by FDA contain, in addition to their principal ingredient of the synthetic, progestin, a minute amount of another synthetic hormone, estrogen. This fulfills some of the roles of the estrogen that a woman normally secretes generously during the first part of her menstrual cycle, and it serves to prevent spotting or break-through bleeding in the middle part of the cycle...
Soon, the oral-contraceptive market will be crammed with pills from more manufacturers, some of them to be taken on a divided schedule called "sequential therapy." This system requires taking an estrogen pill for 16 days, then a progestin pill for five days. Its proponents claim that it comes closer to the natural physiological hormone cycle. Mead, Johnson & Co. already has an application before FDA asking approval of sequential-therapy pills compounded of ingredients bought from British Drug Houses, Ltd. And Indianapolis' Eli Lilly & Co., working with Syntex, is on the same tack. Michigan's Upjohn...