Fertility: S01 E18 – PCOS – Dr. Foulk

Oh hello my name is Dr. Russell Foulk and today’s subject we’re going to go over is polycystic ovarian syndrome a lot of people know it is PCOS or some people have heard they call it Pecos but most people refer to it as PCOS polycystic ovarian syndrome. A lot of folks think that it’s a new phenomenon or epidemic that’s been happening now since a lot of folks now or hearing about it but in reality it’s been around forever it was first described as a condition back in 1935 when some pathologist found at certain groups of women have a lot of cysts on their ovaries they didn’t understand hormones back then because they got measurement that stage but since we’ve learned about hormones we’ve learned that that’s all it is is a hormone imbalance and it results in a imbalance of the hormones that govern ovarian function. Normally the ovaries work by the brain sending signals down to the ovaries to produce follicles follicles are little cysts in the ovaries that contain the eggs and make the hormones that they can controls the uterus have regular periods so when those hormones from the brain are out of balance the ovary doesn’t know what to do. So instead of making follicles and ovulating a person might have irregular cycles and they don’t ovulate so common result of that is infertility can’t get pregnant if you don’t ovulate. Fortunately it’s one of the most easy problems to fix an infertility. Another fast fact about it is the fact that it is the most common cause of infertility in all couples the most common reason for infertility in women is lack of ovulation and the most common reason for lack of ovulation is polycystic ovarian syndrome. No one really knows that the true causes we do know that it runs in families and it’s an inherent hormone imbalance that’s related to insulin and androgens other hormones and their body. The symptoms that it presents with are irregular periods and some form of hyperandrogenism which means hormones that lead to oily skin hair growth on your face acne when you have those two hallmarks than most likely you have polycystic ovarian syndrome lot of doctors even get confused in terms of how to diagnose it and its diagnosed clinically by those two symptoms irregular periods and some form of hyperandrogenism. As I mentioned is the easiest problem to fix because all we have to do is restore the hormone balance tell the ovary what to do and then the ovary will carry it from there so it’ll start making eggs making you ovulate and start regulating your cycles once you start having regular cycles and start ovulating as long as everything else is working then you’re on your way to getting pregnant. So once you’ve been diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome the common treatments that we use our metformin clomiphene and femara does the principal ones what metformin does is its a medicine that we often use with diabetics and it lowers the insulin resistance that you see with PCOS on the other side of the equation to give Clomid or femara another name for that is letrozole and they increase the FSH that the brain makes and that drives it over to make a follicle so the pills you take five days in a month and the key when you take those medicines to monitor and make sure that the ovaries indeed making a follicle. A common error that some people do is take those medicines and not monitor if you don’t monitor you don’t know what the outcome of these so what were doing in our office is look for an ultrasound and you can see the follicles grow by ultrasound. When that happens you know that you’re at the right doze. If you don’t monitor and don’t know if those follicles are growing then who knows whether it’s working or not. So if you feel like you might have this condition based on those symptoms seek out help go to your physician or come to a reproductive endocrinologist like that are Center at the Nevada Center for Reproductive Medicine and will be happy to help you it’s very easy to treat stay positive we’ll be able to get over it and eventually regulate your cycles again treat some of those obnoxious symptoms that you’ve been suffering from and ultimately end up with the baby.