Tana Ramsay, wife to celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, recently revealed she struggled with infertility after a PCOS diagnosis.
Speaking on the Happy Mum Happy Baby podcast recently, Tana Ramsay, 50, opened up about her family's fertility journey. After struggling to get pregnant, she visited her doctor, who diagnosed her with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).
"The first thing (I) asked was, ‘Does that mean I’ll never be a mother?'" Ramsay recalled.
But she would go on to become a mother. Thanks to several rounds of in-vitro fertilization (IVF), the Ramsays are now parents to six children: Megan, 26, Jack and Holly, 24, Matilda, 22, Oscar, 5, and Jesse, 9 months.
PCOS is a hormone disorder that can cause infertility and affects roughly one in 10 American women, according to the Endocrine Society. Here's what medical experts want you to know about the health issue.
PCOS is categorized as a "set of symptoms caused by a problem with a woman’s hormones," according to Johns Hopkins Medicine.
When the body doesn't make enough of the hormones necessary for ovulation, the ovaries can develop cysts, which then make androgens, a hormone that men typically have higher amount of. This can cause irregular menstrual cycles, as well as symptoms including excess body hair, weight gain, acne, thinning hair and skin tags, per Johns Hopkins.
But the difficult part is that not all of these symptoms are present in every person with PCOS.
"PCOS is a very unusual condition is that it's not one specific disease," Dr. Karen Tang, gynecologist, tells USA TODAY. "One person's PCOS can be very different than another."
Medical experts don't really know what causes PCOS.
"There is an association with being overweight or obese, but I think of it as sort of the chicken or the egg, because having PCOS can also make it harder to lose weight or can contribute to weight gain," Tang says.
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The short answer, per Dr. Tang, is that weight loss may actually alleviate some PCOS symptoms, but medical experts say you can't actually cure PCOS. A 2019 study in the journal Clinical Medicine Insights: Reproductive Health found that losing 5% of body weight led to "meaningful improvements in the reproductive, hyperandrogenic and metabolic features of PCOS."
But the longer answer is more complicated, because PCOS can also make losing weight more difficult than it is for the average person.
"We now know that there's a really strong association between PCOS and insulin resistance or diabetes," Tang says. She points to statistics that say 50% to 75% of people with PCOS will deal with one of the two at some point. "Insulin can obviously increase weight gain and can cause it to be harder to lose weight."
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Experts have a few avenues for solutions. From a medication standpoint, they may prescribe a diabetes medication such as Metformin — but only for those who are actually insulin-resistant, Tang says. Estrogen-containing birth control pills are also commonly prescribed as a way to work to lower testosterone levels.
From a lifestyle perspective, Tang also highlights the importance of managing stress levels and sleep quality.
"(High) cortisol can worsen blood sugar, so (focusing on) things like stress management and ensuring you have enough sleep to minimize cortisol spikes that could worsen blood sugar can actually potentially help with PCOS," Tang adds.
