The most common cause of female infertility – polycystic ovary syndrome – may be caused by a hormonal imbalance before birth. The finding has led to a cure in mice, and a drug trial is set to begin in women later this year.
Polycystic ovary syndrome affects up to one in five women worldwide, three-quarters of whom struggle to fall pregnant. The condition is typically characterised by high levels of testosterone, ovarian cysts, irregular menstrual cycles, and problems regulating sugar, but the causes have long been a mystery. “It’s by far the most common hormonal condition affecting women of reproductive age but it hasn’t received a lot of attention,” says Robert Norman at the University of Adelaide in Australia.
Just going to point out that as much as this excerpt here describes it as affecting “fertility” and oh woe, they can’t get pregnant as easy…uh, it’s also something that can make them fucking miserable and POTENTIALLY KILL THEM
Here’s the thing: ovaries normally do produce cysts. They’re supposed to! To an extent. They produce like, a tiny number, maybe one, each menstrual cycle, because the egg that is ready to be hypothetically fertilized, is PUSHED OUT to the fallopian tube, by an actual cyst.
This is the normal process, in the “4 out of 5″ women who don’t have PCOS.
In PCOS, though, my understanding is that the cyst production does not happen in this nice, orderly fashion, only happening approximately every few weeks; instead, it goes haywire and happens all over the place and WAY too much (hence “polycystic”).
Left unchecked, this can cause the organ to become damaged, it can cause it to swell and even press on other things in the abdomen and put OTHER parts of the body at risk, can cause all sorts of awful things.
IIRC ( @tekka-wekka I think you know more about this than I do, by all means please correct me if I’m wrong about any of it?) it tends to cause a lot of pain or heavy bleeding during many people’s menstrual cycles and, as noted, causes them to be more irregular – so it’s basically a disability, one that can be LIFE-THREATENING.
And guess what the main treatment for PCOS is, to keep the cysts in line and regulate the menstrual cycle properly?
Hormone-regulating pills.
You know, the ones normally labeled “birth control”.
This was what Sandra Fluke was testifying about a few years back, during health care debates, by the way. She had a friend who had EXACTLY this condition, and the fact that Georgetown’s student health coverage would NOT cover her “birth control” medication meant that she went without it for three months…and her ovaries, filled with cysts, enlarged so much that she required EMERGENCY SURGERY (to remove them entirely, IIRC).
Which is why Sandra Fluke was FIRMLY arguing for increased access to “birth control” medications; because leaving aside questions of autonomy, it’s an actual literal life-or-death health necessity for many people! Such as those with PCOS in specific!
But I digress.
My point is: this is a condition that goes beyond “fertility” issues; it requires a LOT of people to go on pretty much (IIRC) permanent hormonal regulation to carefully regulate their menstrual cycles in order to NOT DIE. Because, left untreated, it can, in fact, literally pose that risk. (And depending on the specific hormonal birth control in question – this may have the trade off of things like a higher stroke risk, so that’s…that’s a thing, too, oops)
So uh. This?
This is REALLY good news.
But not JUST for folks with PCOS who want to have biological children; it’s literally just good news in general, because this could be LIFE-SAVING research??
I just wanted to point that out because, like, I don’t think a lot of people are aware of PCOS and how it can potentially KILL YOU, and there’s a lot of misconceptions about ovarian/uterine health in general, and like… and I think some folks might scroll past this thinking it’s mostly about “fertility”?
When it’s actually a condition that impacts WAY more than that, and chances are very very good you actually know someone with this condition, whether you realize it or not.
How to hack any hospital computer (L337 version for advanced security systems)
-Use the password taped to the back of the monitor
As a computer guy: This is what happens when you have too much security. It reaches a tipping point and then suddenly you have none.
Security at the cost of convenience comes at the cost of security.
This is true of so many things in healthcare. Example: our software is designed to automatically alert the doctor if a patient’s vital signs are critically out of range. If someone has a blood pressure of 200/130, the doc gets a pop-up box that they have to acknowledge before doing anything else. It makes sense, in our setting.
But then some mega-genius upstairs realized something: the system was only alerting for critical vital signs, but not for all vital signs that could possibly be bad. Like, yeah, 200/130 is potentially life-threatening, but 130/90 is above ideal and can have negative effects on health. Should the doctors be allowed to just ignore something that could negatively affect a patient’s health? Heavens no!
So now the system generates a pop-up for any vital signs that are even slightly abnormal. A pressure of 120/80 (once considered textbook normal, now considered slightly high) will create the pop-up. We have increased our vigilance!
Well, no, what we’ve actually done is train doctors to click through a constant bombardment of pop-ups without looking. We’ve destroyed their vigilance and made it much easier for them to accidentally skim past life-threatening vital signs.
But you can’t tell that to management, because you’d have to confess that you are a flawed human with limited attention resources. They’d tell you “well, all the other doctors take every abnormal vital sign seriously, it sounds like you’re being negligent.” And if you’re smart, you back down before you start telling the big boss all about your habit of ignoring critical safety alerts.
The end result is exactly the same as if we had no alerts at all, except with more annoying clicking.
the thing about organic chemistry is that you finally get to use all the aesthetically pleasing mad scientist looking chemistry apperatuses that you’ve been waiting to use for years but when u finally get to use them they all turn out to do surprisingly boring things
behold, the radical-looking and DEEPLY aesthetically pleasing rotovap we used in lab today. ‘ooo what is it doing???’ u ask, as I also did. ‘surely this spits lightning or something. maybe it could even kill a man. this would be a formitabble opponent in the robot apocalypse’
but no. it turns out that the machine called ‘the rotovap’ just evaporates things faster….by rotating them
And you don’t enjoy that? You joyless corn shuck.
human brain: this machine is not nearly as cool in functionality as i anticipated
monkey brain:
responses to this post so far:
people who love her
people who hate her
people who are afraid that my lab ta, who is operating this machine for all of us, is going to break her
Plot Designing 