Polycystic ovary syndrome has been renamed polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome after a 14-year global effort to replace a name doctors and patients said was misleading. The change was published in The Lancet on Tuesday and is meant to better reflect a condition that affects 1 in 8 women and more than 170 million women worldwide.
For many of the people behind the change, the new name is not cosmetic. It is a correction. Researchers said the disorder is marked by hormone fluctuations that can affect weight, metabolic health, mental health, skin and the reproductive system, and they said there is no increase in abnormal cysts in the condition. Helena Teede, a leader in the work, said the old term was inaccurate and that the diverse features of the condition were often unappreciated.
The shift follows years of patient surveys, workshops and expert meetings that drew in more than 50 patient and professional organizations and produced more than 22,000 responses. A wider group of 56 academic, clinical and patient organizations took part in the process, which was led internationally by Terhi Piltonen of the International Androgen Excess and Polycystic Ovary Syndrome Society, along with Anuja Dokras and Rachel Morman. The transition will take three years, with full adoption expected in the 2028 International Guideline update.
The old name, Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, or PCOS, had long been criticized for narrowing a complex endocrine disorder to cysts and ovaries. That framing, experts said, helped obscure the condition's hormonal, metabolic and mental health effects. In 2012, experts at the U.S. National Institutes of Health had already recommended a name change, calling PCOS a confusing distraction for patients and providers.
The tension in the renaming is that the science was never the hard part. Agreement was. Teede said the effort had been guided by patient benefit, scientific accuracy, ease of communication, avoidance of stigma and cultural appropriateness. The new name will now have to survive the more difficult test: whether doctors, patients and health systems actually use it, and whether that helps close the diagnosis and care gaps that made the change necessary in the first place.
