A better understanding of PCOS offers fresh hope for new treatments

New insights into polycystic ovary syndrome are revealing much astir the causes of this communal but misunderstood whole-body condition, and these could pb to caller treatments

Health 23 January 2023

By Alice Klein

Owen Gent

I WAS 19, my look raging with acne, erstwhile my dermatologist started asking maine questions that seemed to person thing to bash with my skin. “Are your periods regular? Do you person immoderate excess assemblage hair?” helium asked. “You whitethorn person polycystic ovary syndrome,” helium concluded. I had nary thought what helium was talking about. “It tin marque it hard to person children,” helium said arsenic helium saw maine out.

Reeling, I went to my household doctor, who ordered humor tests and an ultrasound of my ovaries that confirmed I had polycystic ovary syndrome, oregon PCOS. But she admitted she didn’t cognize overmuch astir it, leaving maine confused and miserable astir this mysterious information I had abruptly been saddled with.

Many of my friends person recounted akin experiences. Despite PCOS being the astir common hormonal information among women aged 18 to 45 and a starring origin of infertility, it has been hard for america to get a consecutive reply astir what it really is oregon what to bash astir it.

Seventeen years connected from my diagnosis, however, the tide is turning. Researchers are yet piecing unneurotic the causes of PCOS and it is being taken earnestly arsenic a information that doesn’t conscionable impact the ovaries, but besides has cardiovascular, metabolic and intelligence repercussions. As a result, the information is adjacent acceptable to get a antithetic sanction aboriginal this twelvemonth (see “Misleading moniker”, leafage 45). And what’s more, this clearer knowing is opening up routes to caller treatments.

The archetypal doctors to characterise PCOS were Irving Stein and Michael Leventhal astatine Northwestern University successful Chicago. In 1935, they published a …