The most common cause of female infertility – polycystic ovary syndrome – may be caused by a hormonal imbalance before birth. The finding has led to a cure in mice, and a drug trial is set to begin in women later this year.
Polycystic ovary syndrome affects up to one in five women worldwide, three-quarters of whom struggle to fall pregnant. The condition is typically characterised by high levels of testosterone, ovarian cysts, irregular menstrual cycles, and problems regulating sugar, but the causes have long been a mystery. “It’s by far the most common hormonal condition affecting women of reproductive age but it hasn’t received a lot of attention,” says Robert Norman at the University of Adelaide in Australia.
Just going to point out that as much as this excerpt here describes it as affecting “fertility” and oh woe, they can’t get pregnant as easy…uh, it’s also something that can make them fucking miserable and POTENTIALLY KILL THEM
Here’s the thing: ovaries normally do produce cysts. They’re supposed to! To an extent. They produce like, a tiny number, maybe one, each menstrual cycle, because the egg that is ready to be hypothetically fertilized, is PUSHED OUT to the fallopian tube, by an actual cyst.
This is the normal process, in the “4 out of 5″ women who don’t have PCOS.
In PCOS, though, my understanding is that the cyst production does not happen in this nice, orderly fashion, only happening approximately every few weeks; instead, it goes haywire and happens all over the place and WAY too much (hence “polycystic”).
Left unchecked, this can cause the organ to become damaged, it can cause it to swell and even press on other things in the abdomen and put OTHER parts of the body at risk, can cause all sorts of awful things.
IIRC ( @tekka-wekka I think you know more about this than I do, by all means please correct me if I’m wrong about any of it?) it tends to cause a lot of pain or heavy bleeding during many people’s menstrual cycles and, as noted, causes them to be more irregular – so it’s basically a disability, one that can be LIFE-THREATENING.
And guess what the main treatment for PCOS is, to keep the cysts in line and regulate the menstrual cycle properly?
Hormone-regulating pills.
You know, the ones normally labeled “birth control”.
This was what Sandra Fluke was testifying about a few years back, during health care debates, by the way. She had a friend who had EXACTLY this condition, and the fact that Georgetown’s student health coverage would NOT cover her “birth control” medication meant that she went without it for three months…and her ovaries, filled with cysts, enlarged so much that she required EMERGENCY SURGERY (to remove them entirely, IIRC).
Which is why Sandra Fluke was FIRMLY arguing for increased access to “birth control” medications; because leaving aside questions of autonomy, it’s an actual literal life-or-death health necessity for many people! Such as those with PCOS in specific!
But I digress.
My point is: this is a condition that goes beyond “fertility” issues; it requires a LOT of people to go on pretty much (IIRC) permanent hormonal regulation to carefully regulate their menstrual cycles in order to NOT DIE. Because, left untreated, it can, in fact, literally pose that risk. (And depending on the specific hormonal birth control in question – this may have the trade off of things like a higher stroke risk, so that’s…that’s a thing, too, oops)
So uh. This?
This is REALLY good news.
But not JUST for folks with PCOS who want to have biological children; it’s literally just good news in general, because this could be LIFE-SAVING research??
I just wanted to point that out because, like, I don’t think a lot of people are aware of PCOS and how it can potentially KILL YOU, and there’s a lot of misconceptions about ovarian/uterine health in general, and like… and I think some folks might scroll past this thinking it’s mostly about “fertility”?
When it’s actually a condition that impacts WAY more than that, and chances are very very good you actually know someone with this condition, whether you realize it or not.
Reblogging for the additional info. Most of the folks I know with this don’t give a shit about fertility. They just want to stop needing S5+ painkillers to function at least 25% of the time.
And they wait til I’m knocking on menopause’s door to come out with a drug that’d potentially make me NOT wanna kill my damn self for one week outta every month.
PCOS also REALLY increases your chances of developing type II diabetes, another way that it can be potentially life-altering and threatening (dependant on your access to care and support.)
Also fucks with your hormones in other ways, like making your metabolism sluggish, giving you acne and hirsutism.
Though they don’t hit on the level of life threatening, these 3 things alone make life really hard for people who want to be identified as female/feminine. It’s hard to be the fat, hairy, acne-covered teen, and even harder when it never goes away, despite any efforts. On top of that, certain birth controls that are effective in combating these symptoms are withheld from fat people despite based on BMI alone.
I fucking wish we could kill this idea of curing PCOS for cis women who want to have babies. I don’t, but I’d love to not have to be on BC for the rest of my life, or deal with the shame of a beard I don’t want.
Long but hugely important to lots of people who have or had ovaries.
Why is the default always “straight” when it comes to characters? From now I’m assuming every character isn’t 100% straight unless it’s specifically addressed multiple times.
Like sorry honey, that character isn’t straight…it’s only a headcanon until it’s 100% confirmed in show and the character says “I’m straight” and then the creators also say the character is in fact straight…jeez don’t know why this is so hard for some people understand ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
Hey. LIVING COSTS MONEY! How about giving more money to the companies that employ me and MAYBE I MIGHT BE OK
This is such a funny thing to me because in Thai culture, it’s completely normal to live with your parents when you’re an adult. In fact, most people live in their family home until they’re married ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Saaaame in Pakistan dude and being abroad for grad school is really fucking me up I am not built to be even slightly independent 😂
In Western culture (including America!) it was completely normal for people to live with their parents in adulthood–sometimes until they married, sometimes longer. In America, that changed (for men) in the 1940s and 50s, when it was really really easy for an 18 year old to get a good job that paid more than enough to live a comfortable life on, or to afford college which would then practically guarantee you an even better-paying job. Women joined the trend of moving out at 18 in the 1960s and 70s.
And now those jobs don’t exist, or are few and far between, and guess what! People are living with their parents again. But that 70-year span was just long enough that it fell out of common memory, and now people are seen as “failures” because the economics have changed.
A very great deal of Western culture, ESPECIALLY America, is actually still based on a memory of the 40′s and 50′s as the baseline of normalcy despite them being a total fluke at the time.
World War II and McCarthyism created a massive shift towards rabid patriotism, Christian fundamentalism and the ideal of the “nuclear family” that resembled nothing before it and we’re still recovering from as the majority of our most powerful politicians are old enough that this period of sudden fanaticism is their “nostalgic good old days” and the way they think things are “supposed to be.”
I love when these posts randomly become tiny history lessons, it soothes me
We live in a country where untrained civilians are supposed to remain calm with a gun in their face, while trained officers are allowed to panic, an react on impulse.
Kill the idea that naivety is an unforgivable flaw but cynicism is just wisdom, murder it, chop it up and serve it for dinner, I don’t care, just end this bullshit idea that it’s better to hate than to love and better to rot in miserable bitter resignation than to hope for the best.
This is an email I just received. I try not to be too vocal politically, but this is the sort of thing that frightens me about Net Neutrality. Please get the word out about this and tell people NOT TO VOLUNTEER.
We live in a country where untrained civilians are supposed to remain calm with a gun in their face, while trained officers are allowed to panic, an react on impulse.
Welcome to Chaos 