Polycystic ovary syndrome might affect men, too—and that could radically change our understanding of the condition

April 28, 2026

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Polycystic ovary syndrome might affect men, too—and that could radically change our understanding of the condition

A condition that affects 10 to 15 percent of women may affect men, too. But many doctors don’t know about it

By Claire Maldarelli edited by Tanya Lewis

Polycystic ovary syndrome researcher Melanie Cree points to an image of ovaries from an ultrasound that displays indications of the disorder at Children’s Hospital Colorado in Aurora, Colo., on November 18, 2024.

Kevin Mohatt for The Washington Post via Getty Images

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) has confounded doctors from the moment they gave the condition its name.

In people with ovaries, PCOS has historically been defined by abnormally high levels of androgens—hormones that typically regulate male sexual development—that lead to irregular menstrual periods, abnormal ovulation and often infertility, as well as other symptoms such as acne or excess facial or body hair. But over the past several decades, a better understanding of PCOS’s root causes has led to a strange connection. Many men who are related to people with PCOS seem to share many of the same symptoms that stem from what researchers think causes PCOS: a genetic susceptibility that leads to metabolic dysfunction, which in turn causes insulin resistance that disrupts hormone signaling.

This awareness has led the medical community to advocate for a name change that is more aligned with the syndrome's root causes for the condition, STAT reported earlier this month. (Slate reported on this previously.) If it happens, researchers hope this change could open the doors for more treatments and better diagnosis of the condition in all those who experience it.

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It Was Never about the Cysts

Back in the 1930s, physicians Irving Stein and Michael Leventhal identified a cluster of symptoms in some women that included enlarged ovaries, irregular or absent periods and infertility. To treat the condition then, doctors would cut out, or resect, a wedge-shaped portion of the ovary. For reasons that are still not fully understood, the treatment sometimes worked; many people started ovulating again.

When Stein and Leventhal looked at the resected ovarian tissue, they saw many small, fluid-filled sacs lining the edges, which to them looked like cysts. These “cysts” became the defining feature of the condition that was soon named polycystic ovary syndrome.

There was only one problem: because imaging technology for the condition didn’t exist at the time, those surgeons didn’t realize that they were actually looking at follicles (not cysts), which contained underdeveloped eggs that had failed to mature and release. On ultrasounds today, they resemble a string of pearls. Unlike cysts, they don’t grow or rupture.

Still, the name stuck—and with it, so did misunderstanding about the condition. Over the past several decades, however, researchers have been slowly chipping away at what drives the syndrome and who it affects.

“Polycystic ovary syndrome is the single most common hormonal disorder in women” of reproductive age, says Ricardo Azziz, a professor of reproductive endocrinology and gynecology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who has spent a large part of his career studying the syndrome. “It’s a global disease, and [it] affects between 10 and 15 percent of all women globally,” Azziz says.

But of those affected, he says, studies suggest only about half are properly diagnosed. PCOS seems to have both multiple causes and multiple presentations. “It is not a single disorder,” Azziz says. “It’s a collection of signs and features.”

Doctors now recognize four distinct phenotypes of PCOS, many of which don’t require the signature excess follicles. Azziz and endocrinologist Andrea Dunaif say one aspect researchers have settled on is that a person’s genetics heavily influence whether or not they develop PCOS.

In their research, Azziz and Dunaif have found that the condition clustered in families. From there, “we were able to show that if you were the sister of a woman with PCOS, you had about a 40 or 50 percent increased risk in having it, and that also led to the question, ‘Well, if it’s inherited and it’s not sex-linked [or passed on the X chromosome], which it didn’t seem to be, are men affected?’” says Dunaif, a professor of molecular medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.

In one form of PCOS that occurs in people with ovaries, a geneti