Birth control may help reduce the risk of breast, ovarian and other cancers in women.
Findings suggest that women who took oral contraceptives for more than a decade cut their risk of developing oral cancer by 40 percent, compared to women who had never taken them.
Birth control was also found to slash the risk of developing endometrial cancer by 34 percent.
More than 100,000 women participated in the study, but researchers noted that a decrease in cancer was seen in subjects with all lifestyles - even overweight women and women who smoked.
“We found long-term oral contraceptive use reduced ovarian cancer risk universally — it didn’t matter how healthy you were later in life or if you had a family history of the disease; all women experienced the benefit,” Britton Trabert, senior author and epidemiologist from the division of cancer epidemiology and genetics at the National Cancer Institute, told TIME on Thursday.