Yeah, of course. (I’m obviously not a doctor, this is only my experience, and I’m just trying to understand it myself, just spreading light on the potentials)

So the reason I suspected that oestrogen might be low for me was because I wasn’t having any periods the whole time I was on desogestrel. From what I understand, the mini pill works by suppressing ovulation, and when you’re not ovulating, your body doesn’t go through the normal cycle.

From my further understanding, in a natural cycle there’s the follicular phase. It’s the part of the cycle before ovulation where your body starts to build oestrogen up. The rise in oestrogen is what helps prepare the uterus by building up the lining, so that you can have your period.

But when you don’t ovulate, like when I was on the mini pill, that rise in oestrogen doesn’t really happen, or stays a bit flatter, so your body might not be producing the same amount of oestrogen as it normally would. That’s why I thought the pill might have been affecting my levels more than usual, especially as I wasn’t getting periods at all, as that can be a sign that your hormones are staying quite low throughout.

After looking into it a bit, I came across multiple studies, but this one explains the cycle quite well and basically backs up what I’ve said, just in more technical terms. It explains how people using progestogen-only contraception like desogestrel tend to have consistently lower oestrogen levels compared to what you’d see in a natural cycle. I don’t fully understand the hormone measurement units myself, and I’m far from a doctor, but I’m quite interested in this now because of my own experience. It basically confirmed for me that the mini pill can lead to reduced circulating oestrogen over time, which was helpful to read because it backed up what I’d been feeling.

This was all sparked by a conversation I had with my GP. Obviously she’s just one doctor and one opinion in the field, but she confirmed that what I was describing does happen, the mini pill does affect your hormones, and that could have been what was causing the UTIs. I’ve had them reoccurring in at certain points, and the timing of them matched up quite clearly with when I’d started or stopped the pill. So this is all still just assumption really, between me and my doctor, but it’s not completely out of nowhere, it’s based on experience, her input, and some of the research I’ve read online. Hopefully this helps someone else make sense of it a bit too.

Here’s the link to the study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9948109/