Importance of Contraceptive Use - Essay Example

Oral contraceptives have been utilized by billions of healthy females, their safety for both long-term as well as short-term is a major matter that has been probed in the vast majority of epidemiologic studies. Over a long period, these studies have turned out to be more thoroughgoing and have enhanced analytical sophistication and size. This topic has been highly debated and researched and is still being studied to find out any association between mortality and the prolonged use of oral contraceptives. However, according to the study conducted by Colditz (1994), the prolonged utilization of oral contraceptives is found to be unassociated with an increased risk of mortality in women. This research results seem to be valid and there is no linkage between the use of oral contraceptives and mortality among females as the study has been conducted for twelve years. 

Through the design selected, the researcher gathered data for 12 years to follow the impact of oral contraceptives on the health of women. The instrument utilized was a questionnaire and the responses collected then were further categorized into groups. The number of participants was 166,755 females between the ages of 30 to 55 years and the data was initially collected in the year 1976 that was followed till 1988.  The design chosen seems valid for conducting a study over several years but this design does have certain drawbacks. The first and foremost drawback is that it lacks randomization thus causing imbalances in the characteristics of patients. Moreover, the recognition of cohorts could be difficult because of the confounding variables. Since a particular sample is selected, the masking or blinding is complicated as in the given case all the respondents were registered nurses of ages between 30 to 55 years. Moreover, it is always a time-consuming option to perform cohort research as in the given research it took 12 years to get the research results.