What PMOS & Endometriosis Reveal About Your Health with Dr. Thaïs Aliabadi & Mary Alice Haney

Natalie Crawford (0:05)

Welcome back to the As a Woman Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Natalie Crawford, and today I am so honored to be joined by the hosts of the She Md podcast, Mary Alice Haney and Dr. Thaïs Aliabadi. Today, we are talking about PMOS, formerly PCOS, and endometriosis. What they mean, even if you're not trying to get pregnant, what you should know about your health, how do you get diagnosed, how do you advocate for yourself, how do you optimize your health, and then what it means when you get pregnant, because these diseases don't go away. These are chronic conditions that you need to understand now so that you have optimal health before, during, and after your pregnancy.

Ladies, welcome.

Mary Alice Haney (0:43)

Thank you. We just had such a fun podcast with you on our podcast, which I'm so excited about. We get to spend the day with you, which is so exciting.

Natalie Crawford (0:50)

I'm so excited to be here. I told you earlier, this is my first time recording my show in an outside studio, so I'm so honored to be here at your beautiful studio and recording with both of you. Thank you for having us. Let's start by the recent name change from PCOS to PMOS, because I haven't talked about this on the podcast yet. Dr. A, what's your take on is this good, bad, and what it means for patients?

Thaïs Aliabadi (1:11)

It's not good, it's amazing, as my kids put it.

PCOS was very confusing. Polycystic Ovary Syndrome was a bad name. Every single time I would see a patient, she would say, my doctor told me I don't have a cyst on my ovaries, so I don't have PCOS.

Natalie Crawford (1:27)

The amount of times I've heard that.

Thaïs Aliabadi (1:28)

Yeah. So the name change had to be done. And the name change, it also hints to the underlying issues, hormonal metabolic issues that happen in a PMOS patient, starting with polyendocrine, because it affects different hormones, metabolic, which the source of it is metabolic dysfunction, ovarian, as we know, it affects the ovaries and the follicles and the ovulation syndrome. So it's a much, much better name. And it affects 15 percent of women.

I've been in private practice in Los Angeles, and I've been seeing PMOS patients for over 25 years. And I will tell you that literature says 75 percent of these patients are not diagnosed. That's absolutely wrong. And I would say that number is north of 90 percent. I would agree with you. So these patients are almost never diagnosed. They're completely dismissed. And, you know, the diagnosis is very simple. As you know, in order to diagnose the PMOS patients, they need to meet two out of the three criteria. And it's really weird for me to say this to a fertility doctor. But the women listening, I don't even know what it was. But I honestly, I can't think of another person on the planet who's seen as many PMOS patients in her life as I have.

And I have a large set of data on these patients. And in order to diagnose it, you need to meet two out of the three criteria, Irregular periods, PCOS looking ovaries on ultrasound or an elevated egg count, and number three is symptoms of high testosterone or elevated testosterone in the blood. But the symptoms of high testosterone mostly being facial hair, body hair, they can have acne, they can have hair thinning, and different patients have different symptoms. So you need to meet two out of the three criteria. For teenagers, in the second criteria, we do not use the elevated AMH because young girls have a lot of eggs, and it's not accurate.

So it's very easy to diagnose. Anyone, if you're sitting at home, you know you can easily diagnose PMOS.

Natalie Crawford (3:47)

Right. If you have irregular periods and acne, officially you meet the diagnostic criteria.

Mary Alice Haney (3:53)

And if you think you might in your symptoms, we started OV, and there is an ovii.com, and you go and Dr. A's exact questions that if you walk into her office, she gives, and you can type in and see if you have the, we can't diagnose you, but the likelihood of having PMOS.

Natalie Crawford (4:08)

I mean, this is so important though, because there's a lot of misconceptions with PMOS, especially in patients getting told from physicians, oh, you don't look like a PMOS patient, or PMOS patients are overweight so you don't have this, or I don't see any acne or hair growth so I know you don't, which obviously some of these things are treatable, so some women have had terrible acne, they've just worked really hard to get rid of it, and just a lot of presumptions and stigma that comes with it, so I think it's really important to be able to risk stratify yourself with testing, but how do you want to break this down to patients?