MON-029 Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) in Adolescent Girls:Toward a Simple On-Treatment Predictor of Post-Treatment Ovulation Rate

There is no approved treatment for adolescent girls with PCOS. The vast majority of these patients are guided into a trajectory that starts with oral contraceptive (OC) treatment, leads into oligo-anovulatory subfertility, then into the use of assisted reproductive techniques, and ultimately into pregnancies with a double-to-triple risk for complications (such as gestational diabetes, preeclampsia and preterm birth) potentially with lifelong sequelae in the offspring. Evidence is converging into the insight that adolescent PCOS is frequently driven by hepato-visceral fat excess (“central obesity”) ensuing from a mismatch between (rather restrictive) prenatal and (rather abundant) postnatal nutrition, on a background of genetic susceptibility (Trends Endocrinol Metab 2018;29:815). This insight has prompted the exploration of an alternative PCOS treatment that aims at reducing the central-fat excess (without causing weight loss in non-obese girls) in order to normalize the entire phenotype, including ovulation rate. So far, this alternative approach has been tested in two randomized controlled pilot studies that were performed in non-obese girls with PCOS and with no need for contraception (total N=62; age 16 yr; BMI 24 Kg/m(2); treatment for 1 year; ovulation assessment during the post-treatment year). In these studies, the effects of an OC were compared to those of SPIOMET, which is a low-dose combination of spironolactone (= a mixed anti-androgen and -mineralocorticoid, also activating brown adipose tissue; Diab Ob Metab 2019;21:509), pioglitazone and metformin (= two insulin sensitizers acting through different mechanisms). Pooled results of the pilot studies confirm the first report (J Adolesc Health 2017;61:446) that SPIOMET has more normalizing effects than OC; there were approximately 3-fold more ovulations post-SPIOMET than post-OC; normovulation occurred only post-SPIOMET; anovulation was >10-fold more frequent post-OC. Pooled results also disclosed two new features of adolescent PCOS: low concentrations of circulating CXCL14 (= a brown adipokine, signaling activity in brown adipose tissue; Cell Metab 2018;28:750) and miR-451a (= an inhibitor of THRSP-mediated hepatic lipogenesis; Mol Cell Endocrinol 2018;474:260), both of which remain abnormally low on OC, but normalize on SPIOMET treatment. The on-treatment Z-scores of fasting insulin and miR-451a explained together approximately 50% of the variation in post-treatment ovulation rates. This simple duo, if validated in larger and more diverse PCOS populations, may become a first on-treatment predictor of post-treatment ovulation rate.