Urban Women with PCOS have Unfavorable Anthropometric and Lipid Profiles: A Call for Action

Management of PCOS requires knowledge about clinical and biochemical markers since PCOS characteristically has several concurrent metabolic disturbances.Overweight/obesity, impaired glucose tolerance, and type 2 diabetes mellitus are commonly reported.In India, not many reports are available about the anthropometric and lipid profiles of women with PCOS.Therefore, we examined the blood sugar, lipid profile, obesity and adiposity measured anthropometric indicators (height, weight, waist and hip circumference (WC), body mass index (BMI), waist-hip ratio (WHR) and waist-to-height ratio (WHtR), skeletal muscle mass, percent total body fat and percent visceral fat) of 171 Indian women with PCOS who were attending a multi-disciplinary clinic in Mumbai, India.Overweight/obesity was common as 15.8% of women were overweight, 62% were obese.A large percentage of women had a higher amount of total percent body fat and some had high levels of visceral fat.WC, WHR, WHtR were above the desirable cut-off for a substantial percentage of women.Approximately, one-third of the women had low hemoglobin (33.7%), a considerable percentage had higher fasting (25.5%) and post-prandial blood sugars (14.3%).Approximately one-fourth had elevated total cholesterol (22%), triglycerides (20.7%),LDL cholesterol (33.6%) and low HDL cholesterol (36.2%).The present study provides evidence that diet and lifestyle play a crucial role in PCOS, and it is important to educate women with PCOS about adopting balanced wholesome diets and being physically active to improve their health.