IN THIS ISSUE

• A Message from Our Founder
• Demystifying: Leptin
• Topic: Acupuncture and PCOS
• Stepping Up: Well Connected
• My Miracle Babies: On Earth and in Heaven
• Readers' Buzz: Struggling with Side Effects
• 
  VIEW PREVIOUS NEWSLETTERS
  

A Message from Our Founder

Christine DeZarn,
Founder PCOSA

Is PCOS guilty of racial discrimination?

You bet! Latina women are more likely to develop PCOS than women of European, African or Asian descent. But wait ... what is "Latina"?

If you look a little more closely, the research shows that it's actually women of native North American and South American descent that show elevated incidence of both PCOS and diabetes. This includes every group from the Inuit to the Sioux to the Aztec to the Amazon. One Native American tribe that's been extensively studied, the Pima tribe in southern Arizona, has shown a 5-fold increase in diabetes across the entire community (male and female). Other studies of PCOS prevalence cite women who identify as "Hispanic" as having significantly elevated rates of PCOS. (See the research page on our discussion boards for details).

The original inhabitants of the American continents knew no national boundaries, and neither does PCOS. But we do observe that the current population of native Mexican and native South American ethnicity is a much less "diluted" gene pool than the current Native American population in the United States where early shameful practices wiped out entire tribes through disease and genocide, and current descendents are often ethnically mixed. Along with Spanish language commonality, this may be why we generalize that Latina women have a higher incidence of PCOS.

However, there is no evidence that Latina women of European, African and Asian descent (as are many Cuban, Caribbean, Venezuelan, Filipino, etc.) are more likely to develop PCOS than other women of these ancestries.

  Read More

READERS' BUZZ:

Struggling with Side Effects

Recently, we received a question from one of our PCOSA Today readers via readerbuzz@pcosupport.org asking if anyone besides her struggles with the side effects of pharmaceutical drugs prescribed for PCOS.

  Read Article