I'm trying to get more nuanced in how I talk about AI. Using AI to detect cancer early is awesome, using AI to write a short story makes you a f*cking loser.
In 1935, two American doctors examined seven women's ovaries and saw small lumps. They called them cysts and named the disease after them. They were wrong. It took 91 years to fix.
What we called PCOS is now Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome (PMOS), announced today in The Lancet by an international panel of doctors and patients. The renaming followed more than a decade of consensus work and 22,000 patient and clinician survey responses.
The lumps Stein and Leventhal saw were never cysts. Modern imaging shows they were follicles, the tiny sacs inside the ovary that grow and release an egg each month, frozen partway through by a hormonal imbalance. PMOS is a multi-system disorder centered in the endocrine system, the body's network of glands that produces hormones like insulin (controls blood sugar), cortisol (the stress hormone), and thyroid hormones (set the body's metabolism). The ovary trouble flows downstream from there.
The naming choice is not academic. When doctors hear "ovary" in a diagnosis, they look at the ovary. "Metabolic" and "endocrine" send them to the whole body.
PMOS affects roughly 1 in 8 women worldwide, more than 170 million people. The WHO estimates 70% have never been diagnosed. Among those who do, 1 in 3 wait more than 2 years, and nearly half see 3 or more doctors first. The CDC reports more than half of women with PMOS develop type 2 diabetes by age 40, a risk 5 to 10 times higher than women without the condition. Around 37% have clinically significant depression, compared with 14% in women without it. Anxiety runs at 42% versus 8.5%.
A label born from a 1935 look at seven ovaries is finally going away. The new diagnostic guidelines roll out fully in 2028. By then, a woman walking into a clinic with these symptoms should hear questions about her blood sugar and her mood alongside her cycle. Those are the parts of the disease the old name hid for 91 years.
Sometimes your husband is playing a Sondheim playlist over the living room speaker at 11pm on a Tuesday because “he’s just on a Sondheim kick” and you remember how wonderful it is to be married to your person ❤️
Putting out into the feed that Lin Manuel Miranda was SO fun and wonderful at the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee today but the STAR was Jay Nayak who placed 20th at the @ScrippsBee !!!
Richard Linklater’s gradually filmed adaptation of MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG with Paul Mescal, Ben Platt, and Beanie Feldstein is not expected to be completed until 2040 or so, but you can watch the filmed version of the Broadway production with Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff, and Lindsay Mendez in theaters on December 5. Trailer below.