NEW DELHI — 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.
