Association of severity of menstrual dysfunction with cardiometabolic risk markers among women with polycystic ovary syndrome.

INTRODUCTION: Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is associated with a wide range of unfavorable cardiometabolic risk factors, including obesity, hypertension, insulin resistance, impaired glucose metabolism, dyslipidemia, and metabolic syndrome. Compared with women with regular menstrual cycles, women with a history of irregular menstrual periods have an increased unfavorable cardiometabolic risk. Recently, the association between the severity of oligomenorrhea and hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance has been demonstrated. However, evidence linking the severity of menstrual cyclicity with cardiometabolic risk in PCOS women is scarce. MATERIAL AND METHODS: This work was a prospective cross-sectional study. A total of 154 women diagnosed with PCOS by the Rotterdam criteria were recruited from July 2021 to September 2022. PCOS women with eumenorrheic (eumeno group), oligomenorrhea (oligo group), and amenorrhea (ameno group) underwent history and physical examination, gonadal steroid hormone measurement, lipid profile, oral glucose tolerance test, and homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance. RESULTS: A trend toward an increase in unfavorable cardiometabolic risk markers including obesity, hypertension, prevalence of insulin resistance, prediabetes, dyslipidemia, and metabolic syndrome was observed in the ameno group (n = 57) as compared with the eumeno (n = 24) or oligo group (n = 73). A higher prevalence of insulin resistance (odds ratio [OR]: 3.02; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.03-8.81) and prediabetes (OR: 3.94; 95% CI: 1.01-15.40) was observed in the ameno group than in the eumeno group, and a higher proportion of dyslipidemia (OR: 2.44; 95% CI: 1.16-5.15) was observed in the ameno group than in the oligo group in the binary logistic regression analysis after adjusting for confounding factors. CONCLUSIONS: PCOS women with amenorrhea show a higher prevalence of insulin resistance, prediabetes, and dyslipidemia compared with those with oligomenorrhea or eumenorrhea. The severity of menstrual dysfunction could be used as a readily obtainable marker for the identification of PCOS women at greatest risk of cardiometabolic diseases.

Storage duration of vitrified embryos does not affect pregnancy and neonatal outcomes after frozen-thawed embryo transfer.

Background: With the refinement of cryopreservation technology, the number of frozen-warmed embryo transfer (FET) cycles and cryopreserved embryos has increased rapidly. However, studies investigating the effect of storage duration on pregnancy outcomes after vitrification are limited and their results are controversial. Furthermore, the available studies did not take patients' demographic nor clinical treatment characteristics into account and the cryo-storage duration was short. So this study aimed to explore the effect of storage duration of vitrified warmed embryos on pregnancy and neonatal outcomes in patients with good prognosis and long storage duration of vitrified embryos. Methods: This study was a bi-centre, retrospective study including 1037 women undergoing their first FET cycles following a fresh cycle from January 2012 until December 2021. Patients were divided into four storage groups in accordance with the storage duration of transferred embryos (612 patients in group I, with storage duration between 1 and 6 months; 202 patients in group II, with storage duration between 7 and 12 months; 141 patients in group III, with storage duration between 13 and 36 months; and 76 patients in group IV, with storage duration between 37 and 84 months). The pregnancy and neonatal outcomes were compared amongst different storage duration groups. Results: Amongst the different groups, no significant differences were observed in the pregnancy outcomes, including biochemical pregnancy rate, implantation rate, clinical pregnancy rate, ongoing pregnancy rate and live birth rate. In addition, no evidence of differences amongst different storage duration groups was observed in terms of preterm birth, birth length and low birthweight. Conclusions: The pregnancy and neonatal outcomes of embryos after vitrification were not impaired by storage duration up to 7 years.

Programmable high-order mode control method based on acoustically induced fiber grating.

We demonstrate a programmable high-order mode control method that can be implemented in high-power fiber lasers. 2 W average-power mode-locked pulses are obtained based on a mode-locked fiber laser working in dissipative soliton resonance regime. The fundamental mode (LP01) is fully or partially converted to the high-order modes (LP11a/b) via an acoustically-induced fiber grating. The mode-superposition fields are recorded using an optical 4f system, and mode components are subsequently analyzed by a mode decomposition algorithm. Our experiments suggest that the mode patterns are stable and dynamically switchable. The method is expected to possess good application value in optical tweezers, fiber communication, laser material processing and other research fields.