[PCOS] my androgens moved before my weight did and nobody had mentioned that was possible
PCOS, insulin resistance, the whole standard package. Eight months in.
Weight came down slowly — about 9kg, unremarkable. What surprised me was that free testosterone and SHBG both moved meaningfully by month three, well before the scale did anything interesting, and my cycles regularised in the same window.
Every resource I could find framed everything as downstream of weight loss. My own numbers do not obviously fit that ordering, and I would like to know whether other people have seen the same thing.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Your ordering is not surprising if you think of insulin as the mediator rather than weight. Insulin sensitivity improves early — well before meaningful fat loss — and hyperinsulinaemia is a direct driver of ovarian androgen production and of SHBG suppression.
So "weight loss improved my PCOS" may be the wrong causal story in a lot of cases. "Improved insulin signalling improved both" fits the timelines better.
HOMA-IR is crude and free. If you have fasting insulin and glucose from month zero you can check whether that fits your own data.
i do have both, from the baseline panel i almost did not bother getting. going to work it out tonight.
"the baseline panel i almost did not bother getting" is the most common sentence of regret and relief on this whole site.
edit: HOMA-IR went from 5.1 to 2.4 between month 0 and month 3, over which time i lost 3kg. so yes, the insulin story fits and the weight story does not.
that is a big move on a small weight change and it is a much more interesting data point than the 9kg.
Flagging the community rule while this thread is busy: trying-to-conceive and pregnancy questions get a clinician pointer, not community advice. That is not squeamishness, it is that the evidence base is thin and the stakes are not ours to take.
the other under-researched one is hair. mine shed at month 4 and stopped at month 9, and i still cannot tell you whether that was the drug or the deficit.
check ferritin before you blame either. mine was 9 and i was calling 1,100 calories discipline.
the trials under-powered nearly every question in this community, which is why threads like this are the only evidence base available and why they should be read as exactly that.
n=1 with no control and three confounders
yes, which is why the post asks whether anyone else has seen it rather than announcing a mechanism.
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