Polycystic ovary syndrome linked with heart disease, on the rise globally
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Key takeaways:
- Polycystic ovary syndrome was linked to an up to 51% increased risk for CVD in women.
- While incidence of PCOS-related CVD varied, East Asia and Pacific region had the highest number of new cases in 2019.
Polycystic ovary syndrome was associated with increased risk for CVD in women, and while incidence varies, its prevalence worldwide increased since 1990, researchers reported.
“Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is a highly prevalent and profoundly hereditary complex multigenic and multifactorial disorder. PCOS has already affected 5% to 15% of reproductive-age females, characterized primarily by pathophysiological abnormalities in gonadotropin secretion, ovarian follicle generation, steroidogenesis, insulin secretion and adipose tissue function,” Zhengwei Wan, PhD, of the department of health management center and institute of health management at the Sichuan Provincial People's Hospital, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Chengdu, China, and colleagues wrote. “The increasing global prevalence of PCOS may be one of the contributing potential factors exacerbating the disease burden of cardiovascular diseases in females. However, there is no systematic study that assesses the contribution of PCOS to CVD and explores the global burden of PCOS-related CVD.”
Image: Adobe Stock
To better understand the relationship between PCOS and CVD, Wan and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of 17 studies and used the Global Burden of Disease study 2019 to assess the global burden of PCOS-related CVD across 204 countries.
Their findings were published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology.
The researchers reported that risk for CVD was significantly elevated among the women with PCOS compared with women without PCOS in both the entire cohort (pooled RR = 1.51; 95% CI, 1.36-1.69) and in a cohort of women aged 10 to 54 years (RR = 1.37; 95% CI, 1.17-1.59) with significant heterogeneity across studies (I2 = 66%; P < .01).
In the entire cohort, the estimated global population-attributable fraction for PCOS-related CVD increased from 0.64% in 1990 to 0.85% in 2019 and was accompanied by a more than twofold rise in the number of PCOS-related CVD cases from 102,530 in 1990 to 235,560 in 2019.
Among women in the cohort in 2019, North America had the highest population-attributable fraction of PCOS-attributed CVD (1.49%; 95% CI, 0.89-2.32); the East Asia and Pacific region had the highest number of new cases (108,430; 95% CI, 66,090-166,150); and the Middle East and North Africa regions had highest age-standardized incidence rate of PCOS-related CVD at 11.93 per 100,000 population.
“It is noteworthy that our research findings indicated an observable upward trajectory in both [age-standardized incidence rates] and new case numbers. This trend is evident on a global scale, within specific regions (South Asia, Middle East & North Africa, East Asia & Pacific, Sub-Saharan Africa), and in the majority of countries studied,” the researchers wrote. “Our findings suggest that the global increase in PCOS prevalence has contributed to a gradually rising population-attributable fraction for CVD incidence. This suggests that the prevention, control and management of CVD in female PCOS patients should receive significant attention.”
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