Endocrine Abstracts

A large body of evidence suggests that in polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) there is a link between abdominal adiposity, visceral adiposity dysfunction and hyperandrogenism and this relationship could be bidirectional. However a well designed study of adipose tissue distribution reported no significant differences between PCOS and controls. Visceral adiposity index (VAI) is a recently reported marker of the cardiovascular risk, strongly correlated with visceral adipose tissue (VAT) dimension and it was suggested to be a measure of VAT dysfunction.

We hypothesised that there is an association between PCOS and VAT dysfunction as reflected by VAI and aimed to study the relationship between VAT dysfunction and hyperandrogenism in PCOS patients.

We studied 256 PCOS patients (mean age 24.7±5.34 years, mean body mass index (BMI) 28.76±7.68 kg/m²) and 102 controls (mean age 28.27±7 years, mean BMI 30.1±8.53 kg/m²) selected from our PCOS research database. VAI was calculated based on waist circumference (WC), BMI, triglycerides and HDL-cholesterol values.

We found that PCOS patients were younger (P<0.001) and had higher waist-hip ratio (WHR; P<0.05) compared to controls, but the two groups were similar in terms of BMI and WC. In PCOS group VAI value was significantly higher compared to controls (P<0.01) and the association was statistically significant (P<0.01) even after adjustment for age and WHR in logistic regression analysis. In PCOS group multivariate analysis showed that free androgen index (FAI) was independently associated with VAI after adjustment for BMI, WC and WHR.

Conclusions: PCOS is associated with higher VAI values, suggesting the presence of visceral adiposity dysfunction in these patients that seems to be related to hyperandrogenism independent of anthropometrical measures of adiposity.

Declaration of interest: The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest that could be perceived as prejudicing the impartiality of the research project.

Funding: This research did not receive any specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sector.