As functional medicine Los Angeles specialists, we recognize that dealing with any illness can be very difficult and frightening. Feelings of helplessness can be distracting and cause you to be less proactive about seeking solutions and desperation can sometimes lead to rash choices and indiscriminate acceptance of inaccurate diagnoses. At times it can even be difficult for women to get a proper diagnosis from some doctors which can cause even more frustration.
This is especially true when you are a woman who is dealing with hormonal changes that are impacting your fertility, or ability to conceive a child. However, PCOS is an issue whether you are struggling with infertility or the many other side effects involved.
Once you have discovered that PCOS is the issue, it then becomes clear that treatment is the next step in learning how to have a good quality of life while dealing with this syndrome. Fortunately, it isn’t all bad. What a lot of people might not know, is that there are a few different ways that you can treat PCOS, and one way is completely natural. Let Functional Medicine Los Angeles, a provider of functional medicine Burbank guide you!
What Is PCOS?
Polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) is an endocrine disorder that affects women as they reach reproductive age. Even though science has been unable to uncover some information, there are still quite a few things that are not understood about it, leading to improper diagnosis.
It is estimated that 70% of women or more who have the disorder are completely unaware that they have it. The difficulty comes from the fact that most cases are not discovered until women reach an age where they are married and attempting to get pregnant.
As the disorder goes untreated, there are a varying amount of risks that you could be dealing with without being aware at all. PCOS is the leading cause of infertility and pelvic discomfort among women.
If you’re wondering why such a huge issue goes without public knowledge or major announcements, then it’s most likely because the previous attempts to find the causes of this disease have yet to be revealed by modern medical techniques, such as homeopathic medicine.
This difficulty has manifested into a lot of frustration and stress for the women who suffer from the disorder, sending many desperate people to find any possible solution from frequently baffled healthcare professionals.
Symptoms of PCOS
How would you know if you had PCOS? Over the last few years, observations from researchers have revealed a set of common symptoms among those who have PCOS. It should be noted however that a lot of people don’t have many of the symptoms until other factors are present, and in some cases, a few of the symptoms never appear at all.
- Menstrual Changes
For the majority of women with PCOS, their menstrual cycles will remain relatively normal, but there have been a large number of cases where women saw changes in their cycles. For some, their periods may stop altogether. Most normal cycles occur between 22 and 34 days, so an irregular cycle would be considered to be anything outside of those expected timelines.
These changes can also be marked by a decrease in the frequency, or the discontinuance of ovulation for several months. These periods may also become a time of heavy or very light bleeding.
- Skin Issues
PCOS causes the body to produce several androgens that cause your body to manufacture much higher levels of skin oils. This can result in more clogging of the pores, and thus cause serious acne. Young women who are going through puberty might even experience severe acne blemishes as a result of their overactive oil glands.
This would make it very difficult to take care of the skin, even with the help of the multitude of products that have been developed to help people gain some relief from painful acne conditions.
- Increase in Hair Growth
Another commonly reported effect of PCOS is the appearance and new growth of hair. This can be hair on the arms, face, chin, neck, sideburns, and even the chest. This affects nearly 60% of all women with PCOS. This growth is due to androgens that excite the hair follicles in these body areas and cause new hair growth to take place.
- Hair Loss
On the other side of the coin, there is a group of women with PCOS who experience other male effects in the form of hair loss. Though somewhat less common, the loss of hair can cause a lot of other issues that stem from a damaged self-image.
- Emotional or Mental Changes
As you might understand, it can be tough for women who are facing this illness to stay positive. While there may be chemical factors at work that intensify depression and anxiety to some extent, it should be noted that many of the aforementioned symptoms would be more than enough to damage the disposition of any healthy person.
Women of darker complexions will often experience a greater appearance of hair due to its visibility, and this can cause a multilayered emotional issue due to the different types of social issues they would face normally.
- Fertility
The androgens that affect the menstrual cycle can easily reduce fertility in some women. This is mostly due to the irregular menstrual cycle and the lack of viable eggs. According to studies however, it seems that the number of women is generally even between those who live with and without PCOS – though it should be noted that the women who don’t have PCOS are likely to be dealing with other sets of factors that impact fertility.
Being overweight can reduce fertility to a large extent, so if you are planning to get pregnant, our functional medicine Studio City experts suggest having an exercise regimen to help you increase your chances of becoming pregnant.
Contributing Factors To PCOS
Even though there don’t seem to be direct causes that can be pinpointed as the source of the disorder, science has recently uncovered a few things that could be related to or aggravating PCOS.
- Your Family History
Genetics are extremely complex systems of information, and that complexity can have a host of unexpected effects on the progeny of basically any family line. Locked within millions of pieces of information are the codes that make up who you are and serve as a fingerprint of where your DNA originated from.
In the course of surveying and studying a large cross-section of women who have PCOS, a unique link has been discovered. According to information collected by researchers, women who are related to other women who suffer from PCOS are nearly 50% more likely to get it than those who don’t have relatives with the disorder.
This means that there is some kind of genetic information that makes certain people more susceptible to this issue.
- Particular Illnesses
It has also been discovered that a large portion of the people who have PCOS also seem to have some occurrences of type 2 diabetes in their family. Doctors were able to demonstrate that blood sugar has a small amount of bearing on the effects of PCOS, and much like the type 2 diabetes that can run in the family, it has other effects that can cause unpleasant sudden sensations of pain and even nausea.
- Insulin Resistance
After a round of tests, scientists have begun to collect statistics that might help give future researchers insight into the mechanisms of the disorder. One of the most groundbreaking pieces of information is that statistical models have estimated that more than 80% of women with PCOS have or will show some signs of insulin resistance.
In most cases, insulin resistance can be caused by being overweight, but further studies have shown that the type of insulin resistance that many women with PCOS experience is specific to women who suffer from PCOS, meaning that slimmer women can have to illness. The danger there that follows, however, is that this insulin resistance can cause the sufferer to become a type 2 diabetic, which can also lead to heart disease.
- Weight Gain
Lifestyle can also play a huge role in how you experience symptoms. As already mentioned, weight gain and insulin resistance are tied in some ways. The part that is most important to remember is that weight gain can be a trigger that reveals PCOS.
In previous surveys, it had been discovered that many of the people who became subjects of the study hadn’t previously shown any symptoms of PCOS. They remarked that the symptoms only became apparent after weight gain.