Popular medicine taken by millions of women every year has given them BRAIN TUMORS

Hundreds of women in the US are suing pharmaceutical giant Pfizer over claims its popular birth-control injection left them with 'life-altering' brain tumors.

Each year, around 2 million women are prescribed the contraceptive shot, called Depo-Provera, which many are drawn to for its convenience.

It is injected into the arm or buttocks only once every three months, delivering a synthetic hormone that prevents pregnancies and removes the need for daily pills or invasive treatments.

But research suggests the shot comes with a more than 500-percent increased risk of developing brain tumors that can lead to frightening blindness, seizures and memory loss, even years after users stop taking the medication.

Andrea Faulks, of Alabama, started taking Depo-Provera in 1993 after experiencing side effects from her birth-control pill. Within weeks, she developed severe headaches, lost her hair in chunks, and packed on 20 pounds.

Faulks stopped taking the shot in 1995, at age 26, and swore off birth control altogether. But over the next three decades, she was rushed to the hospital several times with excruciating headaches, dizziness, and tremors in her hand.

'I knew within myself something was wrong,' Faulks, now 55, told the Daily Mail.

Last summer, after being dismissed by six doctors, an MRI revealed that Faulks had a meningioma, a slow-growing tumor that forms in the brain and spinal cord.

Faulks is now undergoing radiation to try to shrink the tumor. If that fails, she may need risky surgery to remove it.

She is one of nearly 400 women across the US suing Pfizer for failing to 'adequately inform doctors and patients' about the medication's potential risks.

The drug carries a warning label about the risk of bone loss, but not for meningiomas.

The Daily Mail has reached out to Pfizer for comment.

Depo-Provera contains progestin, a synthetic version of the hormone progesterone, which prevents pregnancy by stopping ovulation and thinning the lining of the uterus. This makes it difficult for an egg to implant itself.

Experts believe progestin overstimulates receptors in the meninges, where meningiomas grow. This could lead to cells mutating and forming tumors.

'If there are women out there that have been exposed to this drug and then been diagnosed with the meningioma, they should certainly be talking to an attorney,' said lawyer Chris Paulos of the Florida law firm Levin Papantonio, which filed a class-action lawsuit against Pfizer.

Experts estimate 2 to 3 million Depo-Provera prescriptions are filled every year in the US. The UK fills about 10,000 of these prescriptions yearly.

Meningiomas grow in the meninges, the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord, and strike 170,000 Americans every year.

Nine in 10 of are benign, meaning they are not cancerous. However, they can still lead to frightening side effects like blindness and seizures.

The tumors grow slowly, so symptoms like vision changes, headaches, memory loss, and coordination issues may take years or even decades to be linked.

This was the case for Sherry Brown, of Louisiana, who started taking Depo-Provera in 2001.

Like Faulks, she was drawn to the shot for its convenience compared to the pills she took before. However, she stopped taking the shot in 2003 due to weight gain, staying off other birth control until undergoing a hysterectomy in 2004 when she was 27.

Brown thought nothing of her time on Depo-Provera until she randomly passed out in 2019 and hit her head.

Doctors discovered a meningioma in her brain, though they decided not to start any treatments due to its small size.

Two years later, in 2021, Brown lost her sense of smell. She also suffered regular memory lapses, taking several minutes to remember routines she had spent years perfecting.

Scans revealed a second meningioma.

Though the newer tumor was too small for doctors to risk removing, her primary tumor had grown to about 1.5 inches, roughly the size of a silver dollar coin.

Earlier this year, at age 47, Brown underwent a gamma knife procedure, which uses radiation to stop tumor growth without making any incisions.

She will have scans later this year to see if the procedure stopped the primary meningioma from growing. If it is unsuccessful, she will likely have to have brain surgery to remove either one or both tumors.

'It's a constant fear and thought in the back of my mind: Are the tumors going to grow? Is either one of them going to grow?' Brown said.

Faulks will also be forced to have invasive surgery if her radiation fails to shrink her meningioma. 'My next thing would be surgery,' she said. 'I'm praying that's not the thing.'

Lucy Woodhouse, a nurse from the UK, was also was diagnosed with a meningioma and believes Depo-Provera may have caused it.

She had been experiencing severe headaches that felt like hangovers and struggled to read aloud before tests revealed she had a golf ball-sized tumor.

Paulos, whose law firm is representing Faulks and Brown, told the Daily Mail that nearly 400 lawsuits had been filed to date from women who developed a meningioma after taking Depo-Provera.

However, he expects thousands of similar lawsuits to filed in the coming years.

'It's certainly a risk that was easily knowable, if not was knowable by the manufacturers decades and decades ago,' he claimed.

Paulos pointed to a study published last year that compared over 18,000 women who underwent meningioma surgery to healthy control subjects.

The study found that prolonged use of Depo-Provera over 12 months was associated with a 5.6-fold increased risk of meningioma.

Referencing the study, Paulos also noted that injecting Depo-Provera into the muscles rather than the skin causes the drug's synthetic hormone to be absorbed by the body faster.

He said 'the best public evidence' of Depo-Provera leading to meningioma is a 2015 label change in Canada.

That year, Canadian health authorities added a warning label to the drug about the risk of meningioma.

'So to this day, the US label doesn't contain the same language as the Canadian label,' Paulos told the Daily Mail. 'And even if it did, I think the Canadian label would be insufficient in terms of disclosing the risk that the drug poses.

'And so here we have a pretty egregious labeling issue where this type of tumor isn't even particularly mentioned, period, let alone an honest disclosure of the increased risk of that tumor to the patient when they're deciding with their doctor to whether to use this product or not.'

Lawyers working on the litigation said they 'understand' that Pfizer has spoken to the FDA about updating the drug's label.

'I would be shocked if we don't see a label change in the in the near future,' Paulos said.

Faulks told the Daily Mail that meningioma 'has changed my whole life,' leading to constant fatigue that has made it difficult for her to drive.

She also struggles with balance issues and headaches.

'I know this is something I'm going to have to live with for the rest of my life, as long as I live,' she said.