Your Birth Control and a Brain Tumor Headline: What the Study Actually Says

A new study made the rounds this month with a headline built to stop your thumb: certain hormonal birth control is linked to a higher risk of a brain tumor. If you're on the shot, or you have a hormonal IUD, that sentence probably landed somewhere in your stomach.

The tumor in question is usually benign, the overall risk is small, and for most methods the increase is modest. The story is real, and it's a lot less alarming than "birth control causes brain tumors" made it sound.

What the study found

The research, published in JAMA Network Open in July 2026, drew on 25 years of Danish national health records covering 3 million people aged 15 to 59. It compared roughly 1,473 people who developed a meningioma against about 14,717 who didn't, then looked back at which contraceptives they'd used. A meningioma is a tumor that grows in the membranes covering the brain and spinal cord. Most are benign, meaning noncancerous, though they can still cause problems depending on size and location.

The risk was not the same across methods. The injection carried by far the strongest signal. People using injectable medroxyprogesterone, sold as Depo-Provera, were about 4.55 times more likely to develop a meningioma. The high-dose hormonal IUD showed ...