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SOS for PCOS
Live a Healthy Lifestyle
By Kelly Burgess
Our generation's lifestyle is much different from that of our parents and grandparents. When they had a meal choice, it wasn't between an Italian or Chinese restaurant, but between eating what was on their plate or going to bed hungry. When they needed to go somewhere, they usually walked.
It's been recognized for a number of years now that our increase in food choices, many of them unhealthy, along with our decrease in physical activity, wreaks havoc with our bodies. Now this trend toward overnourishment has been linked to a rise in polycystic ovarian syndrome, or PCOS, which is the No. 1 cause of infertility. This discovery launched a movement calling for women to focus more intensively on lifestyle factors in treating PCOS, rather than relying on traditional infertility treatments.
PCOS is not a new condition, but despite the fact that it was first identified in 1935 (and was originally known as Stein-Leventhal syndrome after the doctors who discovered it), there has been no real agreement as to its cause. As recently as five years ago, according to Dr. Ronald Feinberg, author of Healing Syndrome O: A Strategic Guide to Fertility, Polycystic Ovaries, and Insulin Imabalance (Avery Publishing Group, 2004), many specialists still believed it to be primarily a result of dysfunctional or diseased ovaries, which was Stein's and Leventhal's original supposition. Others blame genetic or metabolic disorders.
What is not in dispute is the increased prevalence of PCOS. Back in the days of Stein and Leventhal, the good doctors saw a total of seven patients with this condition. Today, the National Institutes of Health estimate that PCOS affects five to 10 percent of all women of childbearing age.
"There's a long history tied to the attempts to define PCOS," says Dr. Feinberg. "What really has caused a lot of people to look at lifestyle issues is the sheer rise in the number of women from 1935 to present who are being diagnosed with this condition. Our genes haven't changed, so what has? The answer is our lifestyle, primarily diet and physical activity."
