Women with PCOS likely to have attention, cognitive issues: Study

New Delhi, May 26 Polycystic Ovary Syndrome or PCOS, a common endocrine disorder in women, can affect attention and other cognitive abilities, according to a study by researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay on Monday.

Women with PCOS often suffer from irregular or absent periods, polycystic ovaries, and increased levels of male hormone (androgen).

While previous research showed an increased level of anxiety and depression among women with PCOS, the new study focussed on attention -- the precursor for all vital cognitive processing such as receiving, understanding, and making sense of the information.

Maitreyi Redkar and Prof Azizuddin Khan from the Psychophysiology Laboratory, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the IIT Bombay assessed two groups of participants -- 101 women with PCOS and 72 healthy women.

The team mapped their hormonal levels before the study and subjected them to attention tasks. They found that PCOS are slower to react and more easily distracted than their healthy counterparts.

Women with PCOS showed over a 50 per cent slower response and made about 10 per cent more errors than the healthy ones in the focused attention test.

Similarly, PCOS women performed about 20 per cent slowly, with 3 per cent extra errors in the divided attention task, the researchers said.

“The cognitive experiments are specifically designed to capture the subtle millisecond-level differences in how individuals respond to critical stimuli. These minute delays reveal significant impairments in attention, which may impact our real-life functioning,” said Prof. Khan, who led the study.

"In the specific context of focused attention, it is not just about concentrating on the task at hand to respond at the right time, but also inhibiting irrelevant distractors," he added.

The researchers explained that the hormonal imbalance associated with PCOS could lead to decreased alertness and longer reaction times. Along with elevated androgen levels, the participants with PCOS had insulin resistance that is linked to attention.

Insulin resistance causes poor glucose metabolism and affects brain cell (neuron) activity, leading to poor performance in focused attention tasks.

Mental fatigue linked to PCOS, such as anxiety and frustration, makes divided attention tasks more challenging.

The finding highlights that decreased accuracy in divided attention tasks may influence working memory, which hinders holding the information temporarily. This makes daily activities such as keeping track of directions while driving or remembering a phone number to dial more challenging, the researchers said.

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