Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is one of the most common hormonal disorders out there, affecting about 170 million women worldwide and roughly 1 in 10 women of reproductive age in the U.S.
Now, it’s officially getting a rebrand — and women living with the condition and clinicians are hopeful it will help more people get the care they need.
A global panel of experts and patient advocates published a paper in the Lancet to announce that PCOS has been renamed to polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, or PMOS, to more accurately reflect that it’s a whole-body endocrine and metabolic condition and that many people who have it never develop ovarian cysts.
The goal: to speed up diagnosis time, improve long-term care, reduce stigma, and support better research and policy decisions around the condition.
Here’s why it’s such a big deal.
Why does PCOS have a new name?
Given how many people have PCOS, it would seem like it’s an easy condition to nail down. But in fact, it’s notoriously difficult to get a diagnosis.
Research suggests it can take more than two years and three or more health care professionals to get diagnosed, and some people say it’s taken them over 10 years. That’s because there’s no single test to determine whether someone has PCOS and its symptoms — which include irregular periods, pelvic pain, excess hair growth on the face and body, fatigue, infertility, weight gain, moodiness, headaches and trouble sleeping — can have a variety of potential causes.
Despite this wide array of symptoms, the diagnostic criteria of PCOS focused on only a small portion of them.
“PCOS is a misleading name as it implies the focus is on ovarian cysts as a cause of the syndrome,” said Lekshmi T. Nair, the endocrinology lead and founder of the PCOS clinic at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center. While a higher-than-normal number of follicles (the fluid-filled sacs that contain immature eggs) can be a symptom, not everyone with PCOS has enough of them to constitute a diagnosis.
This is what led to a delay in diagnosis for Chloe Buchanan-Puig, a 32-year-old from Nashville. Buchanan-Puig said she’d always had heavy periods, but they started getting very irregular and painful in 2024.
It was common for her to have to take a day off work and lie in bed with a heating pad. While ibuprofen took the edge off, it never fully eliminated her pain. During this time, she also started noticing an increase in facial hair, sugar cravings and lethargy.
“I was getting videos of people on TikTok who were talking about it too, and I was like, ‘I 100 percent have this,’” Buchanan-Puig said. “I went to a doctor, and they did an ultrasound. I didn’t have any cysts, so they basically just brushed me off and said nothing was wrong.”
She said she “just dealt with it for another year” until she found a gynecologist she trusted — and who believed her. She got an official diagnosis this year.
Traditionally, to receive a PCOS diagnosis, women needed to meet at least two of the following three criteria:
- Reduced or absent ovulation and/or menstruation
- Elevated levels of testosterone or similar hormones that are usually found in high levels in men (a.k.a. androgens) or hirsutism, which is excessive or atypical hair growth and a sign of elevated androgens
- Polycystic ovaries on an ultrasound or elevated anti-Mullerian hormone (AMD), which is a marker of ovarian reserve, or the amount of remaining eggs in a woman’s ovaries
The diagnostics guidelines were focused on only the reproductive aspect of the condition, said endocrinologist Anuja Dokras, one of the co-authors of the Lancet paper and director of the Penn Polycystic Ovary Syndrome Center. But the reality is that women may experience completely different symptoms, allowing them to slip through the cracks and be misdiagnosed.
PMOS is more comprehensive. “The new name, PMOS, highlights the complex nature of this syndrome and the involvement of multiple systems, including metabolic, reproductive, psychological and dermatological concerns,” said Nair, of OSU.
According to the Lancet paper, PMOS is associated with the following symptoms and health conditions:
How could this change the way women are diagnosed?
Nair said the name change to PMOS could help providers and patients understand the condition better and ultimately lead to quicker diagnoses. “It may make it clearer to all that PCOS is not focused on the presence or absence of ovarian cysts, and clarify the importance of the multi-system involvement,” she said.
This is an exciting step forward for women like Buchanan-Puig and Chloe Keller, a 29-year-old from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who fought for years to get doctors to take her symptoms seriously.
Keller started showing symptoms in 2012, around the age of 15. “I would get really awful migraines, and I started to get an overgrowth of dark, thick hairs on my chin,” she said. “By the time I turned 18, my chin hairs had gotten increasingly worse, I had acne all over my cheeks on my face, and my migraines became inner-ear vertigo almost daily. It was at this time that I started to increasingly put on weight.”
Keller researched her symptoms but said she initially wrote off PCOS because her periods at that time were pretty consistent. In 2020, she decided to bring it up to her doctor, who told her losing weight would decrease her symptoms. Even though she ate well and exercised regularly, her weight didn’t budge and her symptoms persisted.
It wasn’t until 2024 that an OB/GYN took Keller’s symptoms seriously and ran tests. While she didn’t have cysts on her ovaries, Keller did have a handful of the other symptoms that are now becoming more recognized as part of this condition.
Keller thinks the new name of PMOS can potentially take away the stigma of the condition and make it more well-known. Many women struggle with this and aren’t given resources or treatment options beyond birth control, she said, and she hopes changing the name will change how people understand it — leading to better care.
“I had to fight for myself for three years before anything was done, and I kept pushing that something wasn’t right,” Keller said.
Buchanan-Puig said the name change doesn’t make that much of a difference to her unless more research is done to find better treatments that aren’t just birth control or weight loss medications, and to determine why so many women have this condition in the first place.
But Dokras, of Penn, is hopeful that this name change will lead to increased funding for research, “as more agencies will likely be willing to support future studies,” she said.
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