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Oral contraceptive pills (OCPs), the most commonly used contraceptive method in the U.S., have a failure rate of about 8% during the first year of use. This rate likely reflects the number of women who forget to take their pills. To determine if a text-message reminder system can improve OCP adherence, researchers randomized 82 new or resuming OCP users (primarily white, nulliparous, and educated beyond high school) to receive daily text-message reminders or no reminders for three cycles. Missed pills were tallied from daily diaries and electronic pill-monitoring devices.
About one third of women in the reminder group and two thirds in the control group also used their own reminder systems during the study (e.g., cell-phone alarms). No signi…