(Paris) Acne, excessive hair growth, infertility… Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) poisons the lives of many women. After years of research, we still do not have a treatment to specifically address it, although a recent study gives some hope of achieving it.
“There are currently only limited possibilities for treating PCOS,” underlines this study carried out by a Chinese team and published in mid-June in the prestigious journal Science.
This work finally provides a promising avenue in the treatment of this syndrome, which is relatively little publicized even though it affects around one in ten women and confronts them with a range of symptoms that are often painful and distressing.
PCOS is characterized by excessive production of male hormones and the abnormally high presence of follicles – and not cysts as the name suggests – on the ovaries.
Concretely, for many patients this translates into problems with acne, hair loss, excessive hair growth, etc. The syndrome also increases the risk of infertility – even if it does not condemn them to never having children – and promotes diabetes.
Patients are often helpless. The treatments currently prescribed only aim to respond to these symptoms in isolation, for example by compensating for the physical effects by using contraceptive pills loaded with female hormones: estrogen and progesterone.
The study published by Science opens the possibility of a basic treatment which would directly limit the production of male hormones by the ovaries of patients. To do this, the researchers used a common antimalarial, artemisinin, and noted an overall improvement in the condition of around twenty patients.
These results were widely welcomed by the medical community. However, they are only very preliminary: to say if artemisinin really works against PCOS, it will be necessary to test it on many other patients and compare the results to a placebo.
Why so much interest at such an early stage? This is because after years of research on PCOS, patients have hardly any concrete progress that could benefit them.
“There are still many things we don’t know, but we can’t say that progress is non-existent,” endocrinologist Elisabet Stener-Victorin, one of the world’s leading experts on PCOS, told AFP.
On the one hand, the physiological mechanisms of the syndrome are better known. Its diagnosis has also been refined to become more precise. Finally, we identify its threats to health more precisely: this is particularly the case of cardiovascular risks and effects on mental health, which were still neglected a few years ago.
But many vaguenesses remain. For example, we do not know to what extent the syndrome is rooted in the ovaries themselves, or in a dysfunction of the nervous system.
A comprehensive summary was developed last year by international experts to take stock of knowledge on PCOS and guide doctors on the subject. However, in several respects, it is difficult to provide definitive answers.
Thus, there is consensus on the need to adapt the lifestyle of patients, often overweight. But this document also admits that there is a lack of data to know precisely what to recommend in terms of diet and physical activity.
Can the pharmaceutical industry take up the subject and provide it with valuable funding? There are small signs of beginning interest, such as a recent fundraising by a start-up company that promises to develop a PCOS-specific infertility answer.
This group, May Health, has raised around twenty million euros, notably from the French public bank BpiFrance, to develop an “ovarian rebalancing” device whose effectiveness remains to be proven.
Will other groups follow this example? The context is currently favorable for women’s health, notably with the recent strong media coverage of endometriosis.
“PCOS represents a fairly large population, therefore in theory an attractive market, especially since it is a therapeutic desert,” admits financial analyst Jamila El Bougrini, specialist in the sector, to AFP. pharmaceutical.
“That being said, it is clear that funding in this area is lower than that allocated to other pathologies with comparable incidences, such as rheumatoid arthritis,” she concludes, once again emphasizing how metabolic disorders such as PCOS represent a research challenge.
