Understanding the contraception crisis

Finding the right contraception method shouldn’t be trial and error, says Elena Rueda Carrasco. She tells FemTech World why understanding contraception is more important than ever. 

“Despite encouraging research, a male birth control pill remains elusive,” reads a recent headline in The New York Times.

Although, according to the article, scientists have been researching ways to create a male birth control pill since the 1970s, negative side effects, such as weight gain, acne, irritability and mood swings, have been responsible for not licensing any products for use.

“A woman can struggle with the same symptoms in silence – something rather normalised in our society,” says Elena Rueda Carrasco, medical scientist and co-founder and CEO of Dama Health, a company that offers personalised contraception recommendation. “Many women are being told from a very young age that the pain they are experiencing is normal,” she adds.

Indeed birth control side effects, such as weight gain, mood changes and headaches, affect eight in ten women, but are yet deemed too dangerous for developing a pill for men.

“The side effects and the impact of different contraception methods on women have been very normalised when you compare it to other areas of medicine,” Rueda explains. “In a lot of cases, women end up with conditions like endometriosis and PCOS – polycystic ovary syndrome – because their symptoms are often ignored and early diagnosis is not achieved.”

Elena Rueda Carrasco, co-founder and CEO of Dama Health

Figures suggest that medical consultations are too short to offer the right guidance and on average, women try 3.5 different contraceptive methods before finding the one that works for them.

“In the UK, we have such a fragmented [health] system,” the co-founder says. “As a woman, you can get your contraception through your GP, you can go to a sexual health clinic, you can speak to a nurse or a pharmacist. And from our own research, we found out that for many women, this is very confusing.

“Most of the time women will probably call or visit their GP and the GP is actually not a specialist,” Rueda points out. “The GPs are doing a bit of everything, with just a couple of contraception methods they’re comfortable prescribing. Therefore, communication is really hard when you have this fragmentation happening and you don’t really know where to go and who to speak to”.

Dama Health aims to personalise and tailor the way women are being prescribed contraception, screening for and identifying the side effects that women might experience individually. An algorithm would then match them to the recommended contraceptive options that are most suitable for them.

“As a team, we are all scientists and doctors by background, and we were all experiencing this problem of trial and error in the way that women were being prescribed hormonal medication and in this specific case, contraception,” the CEO says.

“I think it all came from personal experience and we all felt that it was an issue. Our chief medical officer, Dr Aaron Lazorwitz, is an OBGYN doctor and he experienced it in clinic, whereas myself and Paulina Cecula [her co-founder] experienced it as women. Paulina is also a medic and she was seeing that actually, doctors were having difficulties and the whole thing ended up being like ‘try this and come back if there’s a problem’.

“We thought that there’s a huge inefficiency [within the system] in this day and age. Women shouldn’t be having to trial and error to find if something is good for them,” Rueda adds. “So that drove us to start doing screening tests, making everything a lot more personal and helping the medical community to make the best decisions when it comes to contraception methods.”

She says that at the heart of this, education and communication are extremely important. “Women and young adults need to be educated around the topic of contraception better,” the CEO says.

“Women especially feel unable to verbalise how they feel, they can’t actually communicate it. So part of our solutions through the screening process, is to ask the right questions that help women understand their bodies and have a better conversation with their doctor.

“For that reason, I think personalised medicine is the future because actually, this one-size-fits-all approach isn’t working. When it comes to medication, you really do need to get that personalisation because the inside of us is so different and so unique.

“With technology becoming cheaper, we have the tools and the ability to make it more personalised and that essentially means taking into account medical history, preferences, maybe some biomarker information and just putting them together to be able to tailor the right treatment option.”

Experts like Rueda believe that very often huge amounts of data are being lost because of a lack of a data tracking system and that subsequently, makes the entire research process harder. “A doctor doesn’t tell you ‘Hey, try this contraception and tell me how you feel’ and actually write a report on it,” she explains. “That information is, therefore, not being captured. That’s dangerous because so much information is not being taken into account.”

But how could data tracking help the medical world? “A doctor is always going to use quantitative and qualitative data to make decisions, so symptom-tracking is one of the most powerful things that we can do as patients,” Rueda adds. “Data has so much power because it helps you essentially prove your point in an argument and is the fastest way to get information and to accelerate research.”

Walking into the clinic, as a woman, and feeling empowered is something that the CEO would like to see in the future and she also hopes that her company will support all women equally.

“The most important thing [for Dama Health] is to be able to be as accessible as possible and help women from different backgrounds. That impact is really important for us and also just working with the medical community and trying to implement our screening tests that could be easily accessed by anyone.”

The team will also be recruiting for beta testers and clinical in Q4 of 2022. If you are UK-based, you can sign-up here to be part of future clinical trials and research programmes.

For more info, visit damahealth.com.