Did you have a medical evaluation? Most women are healthy and all this unwanted hair is caused by inherited tendency and the hair follicle being sensitive to circulating androgens in the blood.
Have your doctor check you over if you are worried.
I have - I have looked into it quite seriously. I have lost hours and hours of my life painfully worriying if I have PCOS which my doctors refuse to acknowledge. I have worried about all this getting worse. After become a lay expert in this issue I conclusively don’t know!
I do have somewhat elevated circulating androgens but within the “normal” range, whatever that means. I could not get my doctors to test my free testosterone or whether or I am an actually ovulating.
I have normal periods, normal ovaries on sonogram, normal weight- I am part middle eastern. My brother is very hairy and so is my father- no sisters to compare, no family history of diabetes.
Still, I have both acne and this hair thing. I could be what Dr. Redmond (endo who specializes in this stuff) calls ‘Hormonally Vulnerable’- I could have partial pcos, I could have idiopathic hyperandrogenism. I just have no idea, my doctors here are not terribly cooperative as I have complained elsewhere on this forum.
My strategy, then,is this: what difference does it make if I call this partial pcos or not, I will will have to treat the symptoms I do have.
I have bee on yasmin and and managed to finagle my doctors back in Canada to give me spironolactone- I have been on the yasmin for 2 months, and the spiro for just under 1.
That should help, but I am still quite concerned with how unmanageable this all is and the extent to which it takes over my life. the skin, the hair ,the laser induced hair, i think I would otherwise be quite attractive and happy.
In your research, have you read Julia Ross’ The Diet Cure? It is a very helpful book for someone with your situation. It even talks about how someone like you may be more reactive at level that the doctors would call normal, but for you would be causing a high level responce.
It sounds like your hair problem is of great concern to you. There are facts about hair that you might want to know. Hair grows fairly consistently. If you can look very closely, you will see that your bleached area has hair with dark roots and some hair that is still bleached to the surface. Those are just hairs that are growing (dark roots) and shedding (light roots). The pigment cannot travel up the hair shaft.
If you have normal periods, normal ovaries on sonogram and normal weight - then you probably do not have PCOS. Many women have excess hair without any of the other problems that go with PCOS or Syndrome X. The fact that you have some middle eastern genetics would indicate that you might have more visible hair than an American Indian (as an example).
Do you have excess facial hair? You only mentioned the abdomen, and it would surprise me if you were prescribed spironolactone for a fine growth of abdomen hair. Spironolactone is an anti-androgen - and if it is what you need - can take 3 to 6 months before you would notice a change. What it does is cause your normal circulating androgens to have less influence on the hair follicles.
Having unwanted hair can make a person unhappy, but that hair is not who you are. You sound like a very intelligent and thoughtful young woman and worrying about PCOS won’t really help. Many many women have unwanted hair and never discover why… My clients often shrug their shoulders and say, “I grow hair. Let’s take it off.”