Polycystic ovaries and polycystic ovary syndrome

In the 50 years or so since the description by Irving F. Stein and Michael L. Leventhal of their finding of unexpectedly enlarged ovaries in a group of women with amenorrhea1, the syndrome we associate with their names has become widely recognized, variously interpreted and a subject of continual fascination for scores of reproductive scientists and physicians. Many excellent and comprehensive reviews of the subject have been published2–4.The present account is written with the clearly declared bias that women with the Stein-Leventhal syndrome suffer from a primary disturbance of their ovaries and that abnormalities of, say, gonadotropin secretion—and, by implication, of hypothalamic-pituitary function—are secondary to the ovarian lesion and not causal.