If you’ve been diagnosed with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (often shortened to PCOS), it’s easy to feel depressed: it can cause hirsutism, weight gain and skin discolouration, as well as affecting your fertility – and women with PCOS report higher than average instances of mental health issues like depression and anxiety.
A PCOS diagnosis doesn’t mean the end of your pregnancy dreams. Getting pregnant with PCOS is possible, and today we’re taking a look at some starting points.
How Does PCOS Affect Fertility?
The root causes of PCOS are not yet fully understood, but we do know that some people’s bodies produce too much insulin. This affects your weight, and also causes your body to produce too much androgen, normally known as the male sex hormone. Both male and female bodies need androgen, but too much can affect a woman’s menstrual cycle, and in PCOS it causes problems with the development of a mature egg each month, meaning your ovulation could be delayed unpredictably or missed altogether. As you can only conceive in a small window of time around when your ovaries eject a fertile egg.
Tracking Ovulation
One thing that you really need to help you get pregnant with PCOS is to know when you ovulate. It happens more rarely with this condition, and that makes every time all the more important! If you can predict when you’re going to ovulate, you can capitalise on that time try to give yourself the best chance to get pregnant.
Drugs
You should talk to your doctor anyway if you’re planning to get pregnant, but especially if you have PCOS. There are some fertility drugs that help to counteract the effects of the condition, and help you ovulate more frequently and regularly. The right one for you depends on your specific situation, but Clomid is regularly prescribed to stimulate ovulation.
Lifestyle
As well as direct medical interventions, you can make some lifestyle changes to help your body be ready for pregnancy. Regular exercise can help you get into the best possible shape for getting pregnant (as well helping to mitigate some of the depression and anxiety issues you may experience), and getting more green vegetables into your diet gives you a boost in B complex vitamins that can help your body manage insulin, and therefore all the other symptoms of PCOS.
A Complete Solution
Using a temperature based fertility tracker like OvuSense, PCOS treatment to stimulate ovulation and some lifestyle changes to ensure you’re in the best shape possible for pregnancy addresses every angle of the problems caused by polycystic ovary syndrome and gives a significant boost your chances of conceiving when you want to.