About 2 in 100 Swedish boys who were born to mothers with PCOS became obese during childhood, compared with about 1 in 100 for boys whose mothers did not have PCOS.
The risk was higher among the sons of women who had PCOS and a body mass index (BMI) greater than 25 and highest among the sons of women who both had PCOS and did not take metformin during pregnancy.
Researchers followed up the analysis with an RNA sequencing study that found higher cholesterol in sons of Chilean women with PCOS than controls.
In another analysis, researchers fed a group of mice a fatty, sugary diet and exposed them to high levels of dihydrotestosterone, a hormone that mimics that of pregnant women with PCOS. Their sons were born with metabolic problems that persisted into adulthood, even when they ate a healthy diet throughout their lives.
“We could see that these male mice had more fat tissue, larger fat cells, and a disordered basal metabolism, despite eating a healthy diet,” says Elisabet Stener-Victorin, a reproductive endocrinology and metabolism investigator at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the study’s lead author, in a news release.
PCOS is common: According to one 2020 literature review, it affects up to 20 percent of women worldwide, or 1 in 5 women. The condition, which occurs when women’s bodies produce more male hormones than usual, causes multiple ovarian cysts and can cause infertility, excess hair growth and irregular menstrual periods. Women with PCOS are at higher risk for diabetes, heart problems and other conditions.
In 2019, the same research team found that the daughters of women with PCOS have a fivefold risk of being diagnosed with the syndrome.