Nicola Davis

difficulties when they've sought medical care around this condition, sometimes about being believed about symptoms or getting the right diagnosis, but still going through medical channels is the correct way to go.

There's also a great community out there of people with this lived experience and lots of resources and support there as well, which is worth looking at too.

The way the condition is currently diagnosed, and this hasn't changed even with the name change, it's based on what's called the Rotterdam consensus.

And the idea is that women need to have two out of three symptoms.

kind of checkboxes, as it were, to meet the sort of diagnostic criteria.

So this could be polycystic ovaries, although, as we've said, polycystic doesn't really describe what's going on, but they're still called that for now.

Irregular periods or biochemical or clinical manifestations of high levels of androgen.

Of course, what this means, and this is one of the reasons why the name change is so important, is it means you can have PMOS.

without polycystic ovaries.

So you might not have those fluid-filled sacs in your ovaries, but still have this condition.

There's a couple of different reasons why this is important.

First of all, PCOS was a misleading name.

It's a hormonal metabolic condition.

There's all sorts of other health implications from increased risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, all sorts of other things there.

And what really struck me as well was something that Professor Helena Teed mentioned.

Now, Helena Teed is an endocrinologist from Monash University, and she basically is

led the charge on this name change and she said when she was announcing this name change she was saying you know does it matter if we change the name and she said it does because in policy in funding in research in education and in health system care everything is structured around which box you put a condition in

If you put a condition in the incorrect box, everything flows from there.

If you don't get it right, if you don't label it correctly, then how it's viewed in the medical community, how it's viewed in research communities, funding, policy, and in the patient community, all of that comes from the name.

So I think it's more than just sticking a new label on.