ESOC 2025 | Hormonal contraception increases the risk of stroke in young women

This is a sub-study of SECRETO and SECRETO is a multicenter and prospective case control study. We enrolled patients from 19 European centers including our centers Istanbul University. And we enrolled patients aged 18 to 49 years old and they were hospitalized for the first ever stroke. And also we enrolled match cases matched for age and gender and also the other for some risk factors in the local centers. And after that we compared some descriptive features and also we did a multivariable analysis to understand the hormonal contraceptive risk for ischemic stroke in that woman. We found that a hormonal contraceptive odds ratio for ischemic stroke is three and it’s a really really important number for us. And we also checked for the interaction like hormonal contraceptive and smoking, hormonal contraceptive and obesity and hypertension and venous thromboembolism history. And we found that these interactions remain insignificant so the main role player seems to be hormonal contraception in our study. We can say that hormonal contraception increases the ischemic stroke and also it increases the cryptogenic ischemic stroke but we don’t know enough about what is the underlying cause of that. Like there may be [inaudible] factors underlying that stroke etiology or maybe unmeasured or unknown factors so we are not sure about that.

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