Kashmir Impulse Desk

Srinagar, May 20 

Chief coordinator of the Indian Council of Medical Research’s PCOS Task Force, Muhammad Ashraf Ganie, on Wednesday objected to the proposed renaming of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) as Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome (PMOS), saying the move excludes data from the world’s largest affected populations.

Ganie, who also heads the Sher-e-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences, along with principal investigators Neena Malhotra and Rakesh K Sahay, issued a formal objection to the proposed nomenclature change recently published in The Lancet and announced at the European Congress of Endocrinology in Prague.

The researchers said the proposal lacked a “truly global evidence base and multidisciplinary consensus” needed to reflect the clinical realities of populations most affected by the condition.

Ganie, who is leading a multicentric ICMR study across 18 specialised centres in India, said any change in nomenclature should involve countries such as India and China, which together account for the largest number of PCOS cases globally.

“A decade of study that ignores the data of 44 million women in India and 31 million in China is not a global consensus,” he said.

Ganie said that exclusion of the ICMR’s multicentre cohort involving nearly 9000 subjects – described as the largest of its kind – undermined the scientific validity and geographic diversity of the proposed consensus.

The researchers also criticised the inclusion of the terms “ovarian” and “polyendocrine” in the proposed name.

According to the task force, data from a community-based cohort of 8993 Indian women showed that a significant proportion had normal ovarian morphology, making an ovary-centric nomenclature clinically inconsistent with the syndrome’s broader metabolic manifestations.

 “By re-centering the ovary in the title, we are merely polishing a 1935 morphological bias,” the researchers said, referring to the original Stein-Leventhal syndrome terminology.

The investigators further argued that the term “polyendocrine” could create confusion in primary healthcare settings with other endocrine disorders such as Multiple Endocrine Neoplasia and Autoimmune Polyglandular Syndrome.

They also said the proposed name failed to include hyperandrogenism, which they described as the dominant clinical feature of the syndrome.

The ICMR study additionally identified what researchers termed a “Pre-PCOS phenotype”, which they said highlighted a growing public health concern linked to metabolic irregularities among women in India.

The task force said decades of research and clinical experience suggested that nearly one in four women in India was affected by metabolic abnormalities associated with the condition.