ASSOCIATION OF ANEMIA WITH SERUM SEX HORMONE BINDING GLOBULIN LEVELS IN PATIENTS WITH POLYCYSTIC OVARY SYNDROME

Abstract

Objective: To find association of anemia with serum sex hormone binding globulin levels in women with PCOS.

Study Design: Cross sectional study.

Place and Duration of Study: University of Health Sciences Lahore, from Jan 2018 to Jun 2018.

Methodology: The study was conducted after approval from Ethics review committee of University of Health Sciences, Lahore. The Data was assessed by IBM-SPSS version 22. Normality of different continuous variables was checked by Shapiro-wilk test. Frequency distributions of study participants were calculated. Significance of the associations was assessed by Mann Whitney-U test and p-value <0.05 was taken as statistically significant.

Results: Most of the participants of our study were married (53.3%) and 77.9% of these married women don’t have children. 35 out of 60 were anemic (58.3%). The median ± interquartile ranges of age, BMI, SHBG and serum testosterone were 25 ± 9, 25.5 ± 9.75, 22.2 ± 13.08 and 0.24 ± 0.15 respectively. Mean Serum sex hormone binding globulin levels were found to be significantly associated with anemia (P=0.046) with mean ± SD of 16.30 ± 5.61 in anemic patients which was lower than the normal blood levels of SHBG (18-140 nmol/l). Anemia was nonsignificantly associated with the other factors like age, BMI and serum testosterone.

Conclusions: It was evident from this study that anemia is strongly associated with SHBG levels in PCOS. Further studies are required with larger sample size in future to rule out the underlying causes.