麻豆传媒

AUSTIN, Texas -- Uptake of long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) in a university health center more than doubled in the weeks following the presidential election compared with LARC uptake a year prior, researchers said here.

The number of LARC devices and implants inserted was up 123% -- from 53 in the 8 weeks prior to the election to 118 in the 8 weeks following the election (P=0.02), reported Aparna Sridhar, MD, of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), and colleagues.

"One thing I noticed immediately after the presidential election in 2016 is that we suddenly saw our schedules packed with IUDs, IUDs, IUDs," Sridhar said at a press conference at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) annual meeting. "Women who came in here were explicitly stating that the reason they got the IUD was because of the change in the administration -- they were worried about coverage of contraception and they wanted to get something long-acting now."

Sridhar, who is also a consultant gynecologist at the UCLA student health center, noted that she also saw "tons of articles" in the media, encouraging women to get contraception in case something happened to their insurance coverage. Data from found a so-called "Trump effect" with an increase in IUD-related appointments from October to December 2016. Athenahealth researchers noting this was "that the volume of visits for IUD procedures and follow-ups has increased in both November and December."

Sridhar's group performed a retrospective review of medical records of women at the UCLA Arthur Ashe Student Health Center in Los Angeles who presented for LARC insertions in the 8 weeks preceding and following the 2016 presidential election, and compared the volume of LARC insertions during this time-frame to those during the same 16 weeks in the prior year.

While there was a significant increase in the 8 weeks after the presidential election in 2016, there was no corresponding change in the same time period during 2015. Sridhar said she would like to collect 1 more year of data before her publishing the findings.

When asked if this might have been driven by providers who were concerned about the students' access to contraception, Sridhar told 麻豆传媒 that because providers knew that the health system in California would be less likely to be impacted by any change in administration than those living in other states, she thought it was driven by students, who were "clearly motivated by what was going on around them."

"This is a young student population who is very well informed and they Google everything," she said.