Symptom Summary

If you’re overweight, despite eating less than anyone you know, exercising more than anyone you know and unable to control your weight, it’s likely you are one of the many sufferers of this condition.

I realise that the issues I mention below can be experienced for a wide range of reasons, and that weight gain for the majority of the population will be due to too much food and not enough exercise. This doesn't negate the fact that for a specific group of women who have PCOS, the symptoms reflect a condition rather than just a lifestyle problem. It’s likely you have this disease if you display a combination of the following signs:

• - Decreased fertility, problems with ovulation and pregnancy
• - Low female sex hormone oestrogen
• - High male sex hormone testosterone
• - Very high insulin levels
• - Compromised thyroid function
• - Compromised pituitary function
• - Excessive adrenal activity, especially at the wrong time of day (e.g. during the night, whilst trying to sleep)
• - Abnormal leptin and ghrelin responses
• - These lead to the following visible symptoms:
• - Male pattern weight gain, including a “beer belly” – many sufferers are embarrassed by people mistaking them for a pregnant person (giving up their seat on the tube or the bus, asking when the little bundle is due etc)
• - Male pattern hair loss (baldness or alopecia)
• - Male pattern hair growth (hirsutism)– growing a beard, growing hair on the chest or lower back
• - Adult acne
• - Prevalence of “skin tags” – the funny little extra bits of skin which appear around the neck, under the arms/legs, sometimes on the face
• - Irregular sleep or insomnia – in my case being a mixture of not being able to get to sleep, then waking somewhere between 2.30am and 3.30am and then not being able to get back to sleep
• - Anxiety – including night times spent worrying incessantly about problems, real or imagined, (in my case sometimes ridiculous, or tiny things which seem to get totally out of proportion – in the morning I can’t believe I was concerned)
• - Depression
• - Mood swings
• - Irritability
• - PCOS: Personally I believe Polycystic Ovary Syndrome is a feature of a wider malaise, so I list it here as a symptom

Some of these may sound minor, and it’s understandable that the syndrome gets ignored as the patient being paranoid, in denial about their food intake or just being a “mad woman”, for someone with this condition, the symptoms are all too real and in combination can be debilitating.

Traditionally, conventional medicine prefers to treat each symptom as a separate case, essentially only papering over the cracks of a much larger problem, rather than getting to the root cause which will alleviate symptoms more permanently.  Only an holistic approach which treats the syndrome as a whole can be properly effective long term.

The physical symptoms of the syndrome undermine the quality of life, self-esteem and, in some cases the mental health of the patient. They also potentially lead to much greater health problems down the road which could be avoided. 

Check out the treatments section of this site for ideas on how to combat these symptoms, and let me have your views below about what works for you. 

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