PCOS affects women's speed of response by 50 pc, accuracy by 10 pc: IIT Bombay research

Time of India

26-05-2025

Mumbai: Polycystic Ovary Syndrome or PCOS impacts women's focus by decreasing speed of response by about 56 per cent and accuracy by about 10 per cent, researchers from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) said.
PCOS is an endocrine disorder in women, with symptoms like irregular or absent periods, polycystic ovaries, and increased levels of male hormone (androgen).
The findings emphasise the need to understand PCOS as a complex medical condition that not only affects physical but also cognitive health.
In their recent study, Maitreyi Redkar and Prof Azizuddin Khan from the Psychophysiology Laboratory, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Bombay found that women with PCOS are slower to react and more easily distracted than their healthy counterparts.
They assessed women with attention tasks after dividing them in two groups, 101 women with PCOS and 72 healthy women. "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. 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," said Prof Khan, who led the research.
Researchers used two task-based tests, the Flanker Task and the Posner Cueing Task, to test PCOS and healthy individuals for accuracy and response time.
It was found that 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. Among the two types of attention, PCOS women performed poorer in focused attention, the research revealed.
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.
"PCOS is a heterogeneous condition, which means that its symptoms and severity vary depending on the hormonal profile, metabolic health, mental health and socio-environmental conditions of the individual.
Despite the variability in PCOS symptoms and their severity, the impairments in the core cognitive abilities of attention and processing speed seem to be prevalent across women," Prof Khan said.
While the challenges of low accuracy and slow response time seem daunting, playing brain games focusing on attention and memory can improve response time and accuracy, the research revealed.
"Increasing physical activity levels, maintaining a nutritious diet, and reducing weight are beneficial not just for PCOS symptoms but also for cognitive health.
Even improving sleep hygiene contributes significantly to improving attentional accuracy and reaction time," Prof Khan added.