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VIDEO: Reproductive hormone may predict PCOS in premenarchial girls
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NEW ORLEANS — In this video exclusive, Andrea Dunaif, MD, chief of the Hilda and J. Lester Gabrilove division of endocrinology, diabetes and bone disease at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and an Endocrine Today Editorial Board Member, highlights exciting new research about predicting polycystic ovary syndrome in premenarchial girls that she presented at this year’s Endocrine Society Annual Meeting.
A major question in the field of PCOS research is how to best predict who is going to develop the condition in adolescence, Dunaif said. To try to answer that question, Dunaif and colleagues studied the daughters of women with PCOS, who are believed to be at genetic risk for the condition, and compared them with girls with obesity, who tend to have elevated testosterone levels before the start of menses.
“It has been suggested that those girls with obesity and high androgen levels are going to develop PCOS,” Dunaif said. “We asked the question, are there any differences between the daughters at genetic risk and the obese girls selected not to be related [to mothers with PCOS] who just have high testosterone levels?”
As Endocrine Today recently reported, Dunaif and colleagues found that anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) levels were higher among daughters of women with PCOS vs. girls with obesity, and researchers observed a trend toward higher AMH levels in daughters of women with PCOS vs. controls.
“Our hypothesis is that some of those girls are the ones who will go on to develop PCOS, and the obese girls may not be at increased risk and may, in fact, have a different disorder leading to their elevated androgen levels,” Dunaif said.
Watch the video for more.