PCOS has a new name. Experts have revised the term to polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, or PMOS, after more than a decade of debate over how to describe the condition more precisely.
The new name was introduced Tuesday in a paper published in The Lancet and presented at the European Congress of Endocrinology in Prague. The change was chosen by a panel of clinicians, researchers and patient advocates, with 87 of 90 voters backing PMOS immediately over two other candidates, endocrine metabolic ovulatory syndrome and ovulatory metabolic endocrine syndrome.
The decision closes a long-running effort that began in October 2015, when experts met in Sicily and could agree on one thing: the old name was wrong, but not yet what should replace it. Rachel Morman, who has been part of the debate, described that first meeting as noisy and unresolved, saying there were many opinions in the room and no one was really being heard. By the end, she said, the group agreed it was a bad name but could not settle on a new one.
The condition believed to affect up to 13% of reproductive-age women does not actually manifest through cysts on the ovaries, even though that idea has long been embedded in the old term. The World Health Organization estimates that 70% of people with the condition are undiagnosed. Morman said patients could be underdiagnosed for other conditions when ovarian cysts are attributed to PCOS, which can leave metabolic and fertility problems overlooked.
That mismatch between the name and the illness is what drove the renaming effort. The goal was to avoid stigma, improve communication and increase scientific accuracy, while also giving patients and clinicians a term that better reflects what is happening in the body. Earlier surveys in 2017 and 2023 fed into the process, and a third survey was sent in 2025 to nearly 15,000 stakeholders. In all, about 22,000 people around the world shared their views before PMOS emerged as the winner earlier this year.
Some dissatisfaction remains. Keeping ovarian in the new name leaves open a debate over whether a possible male form of the syndrome could ever be named the same way, a tension that did not disappear with Tuesday’s announcement. Even so, the new term is now the one experts have settled on, and the long argument over PCOS has ended with a name meant to be more precise than the one it replaces.
Pcos gets a new name: experts adopt PMOS after years of debate
