A recent study reported by a Wayne State University research team that touted unexpected health benefits for the birth-control pill was wrong and should be discounted, say scientists with the Women's Health Initiative, whose data base was used for the study. An epidemiologist at Seattle's Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, which collected the data on which the WSU study was based, said the association between the pill and a lower incidence of disease was mainly a factor of age. The older the women, the more health problems they were likely to have, and the less likely they were to have used oral contraceptives. Dr. Rahi Victory and his co-authors at Wayne State did take age into consideration, but they didn't control for it adequately, according to Ross Prentice, who headed the team that gathered the original data. John Oliver, vice president for research at WSU, said the findings presented by Rahi and his team at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in October were preliminary. "I suspect it made a bigger splash than they anticipated," he said.