Uncovering a hidden epidemic. It is an illness you have probably never heard of but Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) affects one in five women in Britain.
This hidden epidemic is a miserable hormonal condition that can lead to depression, relationship traumas and a lack of self-esteem, but worst of all women who have experienced it first hand say it has robbed them of their femininity.
Classic symptoms include problem periods, obesity, acne, and excess facial or body hair, infertility problems, breast pain, mood swings, dizziness and an increased risk of miscarriage.
In the long term the risks to your health, if not treated, can be costly. Sufferers are seven times more likely to develop diabetes and suffer a heart attack than non sufferers.
The condition is thought to be hereditary, and is triggered or made worse by poor diet, a lack of exercise, and stress. Other contributory factors include pollution and a weak immune system.
Although the condition has been recognised for 75 years and much research is underway, it is still not known exactly what causes it. The good news, though, is that it is treatable by medication, changes in diet and exercise.
What is known is that the two key biochemical causes of PCOS are that sufferers make too much insulin and too much testostorone.
Insulin works to control sugar levels in the blood but women with PCOS are known to be resistant to their own insulin. By the age of 40, up to 40 per cent of women with PCOS have some level of abnormal glucose tolerance, in the form of either diabetes or impaired glucose tolerance.
Most often, symptoms first appear in adolescence, around the start of menstruation. However, some women do not develop symptoms until their early to mid-20's. Although PCOS presents early in life, it persists through and beyond the reproductive years.
The condition gets its name from the many small cysts that build up inside the ovaries. The first step to diagnosing it is a blood test followed by an ultrasound scan.
A lot of GPs know very little about PCOS, as 28-year-old Colette Harris found out when she was diagnosed with the condition in 1996. She had all the classic symptoms - and had put on two stone in weight in a few months.
'I was bewildered, frightened because I was told there was 'no cure' and left with my self-esteem in shreds,' she said.
'I didn't want to be fat and spotty, be so tired that I could sleep for 17 hours on a Friday night and be ready for bed again only four hours after I woke up. And I didn't want to feel unfeminine, with darkening hairs on my upper lip and a sense that my body might not be able to produce children should I decide that would be a good idea.'
One explanation for why it is difficult to diagnose this hormonal disorder is that it can vary wildly in severity.
At the time Colette's doctor told her there was nothing she could do except go on the Pill - which has now been shown makes the condition worse. Colette had suffered a range of side-effects from taking the contraceptive, and was unwilling to go back on it.
The only option left to Colette, now a health journalist, was to wait to be referred to a specialist which would have taken over a year. So she decided to trawl endless health articles in a bid to find her own answers and came up with a fairly drastic health regime.
The basics were a wholefood vegan diet, cutting out dairy produce, no alcohol or caffeine, herbal and nutritional supplements to rebalance her hormonal system, filtered water and gentle exercise.
After a year she astounded doctors who examined her ovaries to find they were cyst-free.
'My periods, which had finally disappeared completely in August 1996, four months before my diagnosis, came back within the month,' she says. 'Weight started to come off, my painful acne-type spots receded, my hair stopped falling out and my moods began to level off.'
Colette felt she should share her experiences in a bid to raise greater awareness of the condition.
Her book A Woman's Guide to Dealing with PCOS, written with Dr Adam Carey, offers a comprehensive guide to the illness plus tips on how to get advice. In 1997 a self-help group for women with PCOS called Verity began to meet, and now receives thousands of enquiries each year.
Adam Balen, a consultant gynaecologist and specialist in reproductive medicine at Leeds General Infirmary is one of few experts in PCOS and has devised a fact sheet for Verity.
'Even specialists are confused as PCOS crosses the boundaries of different specialities, such as endocrinology which deals with hormones, gynaecology and even dermatology for the acne,' he says.
'There has been increasing awareness of PCOS in the last five years and while traditionally it has been a taboo subject I think more and more women are happy to discuss their symptoms.
'Verity have made a huge difference in raising public and professional awareness of the syndrome.' ( dailymail.co.uk )
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