PCOS Isn't What You Think It Is - Prof Colin Duncan & Prof Mick Rae

So your specialist subject or one of is polycystic ovarian syndrome, which as of just last week is no longer called polycystic ovarian syndrome.

So Colin, can you tell us a wee bit about PMOS, what it means and why the name change has happened?

Yeah.

I mean, one of the things about polycystic ovary syndrome is that it doesn't have any cysts in the ovary.

And I think a lot of patients got very confused.

And to be honest, it's not all about the ovary.

And so PMOS is the new name for it, and that's called polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome.

And it highlights the fact that it's more than just the ovary and there's a metabolic component, but it's not that much different from PCOS to PMOS, which allows obviously sort of patients to still understand it.

But it's going to be a tough thing for people to shift over from PCOS to PMOS.

But the crucial thing is that people focus on cysts and there's no cysts in the ovary and PCOS or PMOS there's just little paused follicles little paused eggs in the ovary because the ovaries got confused.

Well that was quite surprising to me and obviously I'm a reproductive biologist as well it's not my specialist area and I completely thought that there was cysts or you know maybe growth of multiple follicles or more than normal amounts of follicles which as you say are the wee sacs in the ovary that contain the egg.

So is that not true either in terms of the numbers of follicles? The number of

follicles are increased.

And the question is, is that why are they increased? And we know that every month follicles start to grow and then some of them will grow and release, and other ones will wither away.

And in PMOS, the follicles start to grow, and then they pause.

And so therefore, they don't wither away as quickly, and therefore you get this buildup of follicles.

But in each of these little things that were called cysts, because we didn't know there were little pause follicles, there's a healthy egg.

And that's why women who have PMOS, who undergo IVF, get huge numbers of eggs collected because there's all these little paused eggs that can be reactivated.

Right.

And it seems like there's been quite a big concerted effort across the globe to drive this name change.

Were you part of that or has your research fed into that? And what do you think it means for the patient population?

Well, I mean, I think that the good thing about that is that it was led by Australia and it involved experts from all across the world.

But the crucial thing is it involved patient groups.

and people with lived experience.

And they were telling us that they wanted to have the name changed because they didn't understand it.