hey! I'm on seasonique but only to control painful periods. I am not at all sexually active. I'm writing because I just read some scary stuff on livestrong about grapefruit interacting with it badly. I'm really worried as I eat it a lot.
This was really interesting to me because I’ve never actually heard about this before. I know that grapefruit can be problematic for some other medications (statins, for example), but before today I had never heard about it interacting with birth control.
So I did some research. Here’s a little background:
Think about the liver as a series of gates. In order for drugs get taken out of circulation, they have to go through the gate that fits them. While an antidepressant may go through one gate, birth control has to go through a different one in order to be usable to the body or in order to be removed from the body. Some drugs, however, use the same gates, and that’s when we get in to Trouble (with a capital T).
Now, what happens if you have two drugs that use the same gate? For example, birth control and certain anti-epilepsy drugs use the same gate. The epilepsy drugs get to hang out in the body, but the birth control is rushed out through the gate faster than it should be. You then don’t have the right amount of hormones in your blood, which leaves you susceptible to pregnancy.
Sometimes, though, it works the other way. Grapefruit, it turns out, uses the same gate as birth control. But instead of lowering the levels of birth control in the blood by rushing it out the gate first, grapefruit shuts down the gate, making the levels of birth control in your body rise.
So what does that mean for you?
Research so far has shown no negative adverse effects. That doesn’t mean anything for sure, it just means we can’t prove it yet. Theoretically, high levels of estrogen would put you at higher risk for blood clots, strokes, and high blood pressure. It might also cause you to have stronger PMS symptoms.
Now remember - this is only theoretical, because it has not been proven. The risks have been studied in a few different research trials, but nothing has come of it so far. I’m rather reassured by that, and I’m not going to worry about telling my patients to avoid grapefruit until some new research comes out telling me to. If you are concerned, call your healthcare practitioner and chat it out over the phone.