IIT Bombay study reveals PCOS impacts speed of response by more than 50 per cent

Polycystic Ovary Syndrome or PCOS, a hormonal disorder in women, is often associated with symptoms like irregular periods, weight gain, polycystic ovaries, and higher levels of male hormone (androgen). 

Research done previously has brought to the limelight, how PCOS affects women with higher levels of anxiety and depression. 

A team of researchers from IIT Bombay assessed the impact of PCOS on focused and divided attention.  Attention is also a complex process that involves focusing on relevant information and filtering out irrelevant stimuli (focused attention). Divided attention helps us handle and respond to multiple tasks simultaneously, mentioned the institute. 

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

As a part of the study, their hormonal levels were assessed before the study and the results from the tests showed that women with PCOS are slower to react and more easily distracted than their healthy counterparts.

“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 Azizuddin Khan. 

Findings:

It was observed that women with PCOD were more than 50 per cent slower in responding and made about 10 per cent more errors than their counterparts in the focused attention test. 

In the divided attention test, women with PCOS performed about 20% slowly, with 3% extra errors. The tests suggest that hormonal imbalance associated with PCOS led to decreased alertness and longer reaction times.

The finding of the study 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.

Health