Complete phenotypic and metabolic profiles of a large consecutive cohort of untreated Korean women with polycystic ovary syndrome

Objective: To investigate the complete metabolic and phenotypic profiles of a large cohort of untreated, consecutively recruited Korean women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), for whom a registry for Korean women with PCOS was constructed. Design: Observational study. Setting: Three infertility clinics and 10 university hospitals. Patient(s): Eight hundred sixty-five women with PCOS were recruited using the Rotterdam criteria. Intervention(s): Standardized evaluation protocol and web-based case report form. Main Outcome Measure(s): Metabolic and phenotypic profiles. Result(s): The subjects with PCOS mainly consisted of young and nonobese women. The most problematic subjective symptom was menstrual disturbance or infertility, and, on average, the patients seemed to menstruate every 2 months. PCO morphology was observed in 96.5% of the patients. Although few women visited hospitals owing to HA symptoms alone, hirsutism was observed in one-third of the patients (33.9%) and half (47.4%) of the patients had biochemical HA. About one-fifth (20.1%) of the patients had generalized obesity, and one-third (33.2%) had central obesity. Prevalence of dyslipidemia, diabetes, hypertension, and metabolic syndrome were 35.7%, 3.5%, 4.0%, and 13.7%, respectively. Prevalence of prediabetes was 20.8%, and a substantial proportion of additional subjects with normal fasting plasma glucose or oral glucose tolerance tests were identified as having prediabetes by hemoglobin A1(C) testing. Conclusion(s): Our well-defined cohort provided comprehensive estimates of the features of metabolic and phenotypic profiles related to PCOS in Korean women. Further longitudinal follow-up studies are needed to investigate the changes in phenotypic and metabolic markers in this PCOS cohort. (C) 2014 by American Society for Reproductive Medicine.