Endocrine Abstracts

Young women with PCOS presents a severe risk of developing type II diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, chronic liver disease and endometrial cancer. However, in term of events, there is proven evidence only for type II diabetes and for endometrial cancer. In particular, it is still unclear whether CV events are increased in women with PCOS. Completely different data have been published and the quality of many studies is relatively low. Some recent evidence suggests a larger number of cardiovascular events (4 fold) in young population with PCOS. However, studies at this age present an inherent difficulty linked to the low number of CV events in young population. In addition, these data are based on hospitalized population and this approach may have some biases because it may exclude the less affected population. In our large follow up of unselected PCOS patients, no increase of CV events was noted. In aged PCOS patients the data are also contrasting with some studies showing a slight increase of CV diseases and others reporting normal prevalence of CV events. Large follow up studies are missing and are urgently needed to solve this important issue. However, it is clear that the number of events in aged women, who had PCOS during their reproductive age, is much lower than that expected on the basis of risk calculation during young adult age. The mechanisms of the discrepancy between CV risk and late events in PCOS are unclear but a progressive normalization of CV risk during late reproductive age may have a main role.