Does Depo-Provera Cause Brain Tumors? How To Read the Research

In December 2025, the Food and Drug Administration added a warning to the label of the birth control shot Depo-Provera about a potential increased risk of meningioma, a tumor that starts in the thin layer of tissue covering the brain and spinal cord. 

The decision followed a lawsuit by more than 1,000 women against Pfizer, which claimed the manufacturer knew these risks and failed to warn consumers. 

Most meningiomas—up to 85 percent—are not cancerous. Some are small and symptomless, and just need careful monitoring; others require surgery to remove. Still, nobody wants a brain tumor, even if it’s benign. So the label change made headlines, and prompted alarmist posts on social media about the dangers of Depo. 

I was instantly suspicious of these stories. 

Misinformation about birth control runs rampant online, and influencers don’t often deliver nuanced messages about sexual health. My Google searches on Depo and brain tumors brought up tons of law firms with information about this link—but they were all soliciting new plaintiffs, presumably looking to make money off lawsuits. 

For the first time in my professional life, I also wasn’t sure I could trust the FDA because of the Trump administration’s anti-science and anti-contraception bent.  

So I dug into the research and gut-checked my findings with an expert. 

Depo-Provera has pros and cons

Joely Pritzker is a family nurse practitioner and the senior director of health care at Power to Decide, a non-partisan, non-profit organization that provides information about contraception to both individuals and providers. Pritzker helps people make contraceptive decisions all the time. 

She pointed out that the FDA added this warning to the packaging information that comes with Depo-Provera in the same way that the IUD packaging mentions ectopic pregnancy as a rare but possible side effect. 

“That’s not a reason why someone wouldn’t choose [an IUD],” Pritzker said. “It’s a reason to be doing better counseling around what people should be aware of if they’re using that method.”  

The same should be true of this new information about Depo. 

All hormonal contraceptive methods essentially work the same way: They block ovulation and thicken cervical mucus. Without ovulation, there’s no egg to fertilize, so you can’t get pregnant. Thicker cervical mucus acts as extra protection by keeping sperm from getting into the reproductive tract. 

Picking the “best” birth control is really about choosing the kind that works best for you, as an individual. The pill may be right for someone who is good at remembering it every day; someone else might prefer the ring because they only have to change it once a month. With the birth control shot, you only have to think about it four times a year. 

Depo-Provera—which is the brand name for the medroxyprogesterone acetate injection—has other positives, too. It’s 96 to 99 percent effective—a little higher than the pill—and after about a year of use, about half to a majority of users get their period less often or not at all. 

There are also some negatives to Depo, including weight gain and irregular or heavy bleeding. Once you get the shot, it is effective for 12 weeks—and you’d just have to deal with the side effects of the injection during that period. This isn’t true of, say, the pill, which you can stop taking at any time. 

Also, Depo-Provera can stay in your system for up to 10 months, so it takes your fertility longer to rebound after you go off it. And long-term use (over two years) has also been linked to a loss in bone density that can increase the risk of osteoporosis, though the loss was reversible in most users when they stopped using Depo.  

What does recent research show?

The birth control shot is not a commonly used form of contraception: Only 2 percent of people who use birth control take Depo-Provera, according to the latest available federal data. Two recent studies suggest that they may have an increased risk of developing meningiomas.

The first was published in the British Journal of Medicine (BMJ) in 2024. It compared the health histories of women who needed surgery to treat meningiomas to a control group of women without meningioma. The researchers determined that women who had taken Depo-Provera for more than one year were at greater risk of developing meningiomas. 

No such “excess risk” was found for any of the other birth control methods used by the patients studied. 

The second study, published in 2025 in the medical journal JAMA Neurology, analyzed health records of more than 61 million women in the United States. It found that women who used Depo-Provera were more likely to develop meningioma compared to those who had never used the drug. The excess risk was most common in women who had taken the medication for more than four years and in those who had started it after age 31.  

These studies spurred the FDA to add a warning to the label. But a consumer advisory doesn’t necessarily mean everyone should stop using Depo-Provera. 

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists advised health-care providers that “it is important to interpret the results of this study with caution,” citing the limitations of the research. 

To correctly interpret research, you must remember two lessons you probably learned in a high school science or statistics class.

First, correlation is not causation. Observational studies like these can tell us that one thing is related to another, but they can’t tell us that one thing caused the other. For example, more flowers grow after the snow melts. But their buds aren’t the reason the snow melted.

Second, relative risk is different than absolute risk. These studies tell us about relative risk, meaning they tell us who is more likely to get a certain disease. Between my next-door neighbor and me, he is statistically more likely to get colon cancer, because he’s older and male. But that doesn’t mean he will get colon cancer, and it doesn’t mean I won’t. 

In these studies, the researchers concluded that people on Depo-Provera have a higher risk of meningioma compared to people who haven’t taken it. Even so, the absolute risk—the real possibility that this happens to any one person—remains quite small. Think about it this way: Buying two Mega Millions lottery tickets might double your “risk” of winning, but you still just have a 2 in 300 million chance of hitting the jackpot.  

Only nine women in the BMJ study who needed surgery for meningioma were Depo-Provera users. Based on this, the researchers concluded that 5 out of 10,000 women using the shot may possibly develop meningioma compared to 1 out of 10,000 women who didn’t use the medication. 

This sounds really bad—especially if you say “five times the risk”—but it’s still a rare side effect. 

An expert assesses the data

According to Power to Decide, there were 23 videos posted to TikTok and YouTube between mid-February and mid-March 2026 about Depo-Provera and brain tumors. Together, these videos have gotten a combined 11 million views. 

This statistic shows that patients have questions, but it also makes me worry that they’re getting the wrong information. 

As a sex educator who writes about contraception frequently, the new information about Depo-Provera presents a challenge: how to incorporate the risk of meningiomas when I talk about the birth control shot in a way that doesn’t unintentionally play into the broader, unscientific “birth control is dangerous” rhetoric. 

Pritzker, the nurse practitioner, told me that choosing a method is very personal and people make very different risk/benefit assessments. 

Some people love their Depo because it helps reduce the pain of endometriosis by suppressing their period. Among those patients, people who are not entirely risk averse might decide that a 5 out of 10,000 chance of a likely non-lethal brain tumor is a number they can live with, given the alternative of excruciating menstruation. 

Someone else might hear the words “brain tumor” and opt for a pack of pills instead. 

I’m risk averse, so my instinct might be to steer people toward other hormonal birth control that doesn’t increase the risk of meningioma. But it isn’t the role of a health-care provider or contraceptive counselor to tell people what to do, Pritzker said.

“Informed consent doesn’t always mean that people pick exactly what you think they should pick,” she said. “It means that you lay out the options in a way that makes sense for them, and then let them decide what’s right for them.” 

In a media climate rife with misinformation and outright lies, nuanced discussions about novel research can be hard to have. You’re competing against influencers who draw sweeping conclusions from their own personal experience or issue orders like “tell your friends to get the f**k off of Depo.” In this case, you’re also competing against lawyers with something to gain.

Patients deserve honest answers 

Misinformation about birth control is flourishing right now because of the reach of social media, and some of these falsehoods could be seeded by organizations with anti-contraception and anti-abortion views. 

But it is understandable that people are primed to believe it. This country has a deep history of medical racism, coercive population control, and reproductive abuse. Pritzker said providers need to address patients’ concerns about birth control honestly—and not simply dismiss people when they cite TikTok or “the internet” as their information source.  

“That doesn’t do anything to build trust,” she said. 

Pritzker would advise clinicians to start from a positive place, saying something like, “I’m so glad you asked that, it’s something we’ve been hearing a lot lately.” 

Providers must also fight the temptation to avoid talking about potentially negative information, Pritzker said, because honesty is how we develop credibility.

That applies to sex educators, too. I’m not your mother and I’m not your doctor, but I hope that I can explain new sexual health research in simple, honest ways—without hype, drama,or politics—that can help you make genuinely informed decisions about your health. 

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