Ishrat Hussain says she locked herself in her room when she learned she could not conceive.
Two years after her wedding and still not pregnant, the 26-year-old visited a gynecologist, who diagnosed her with polycystic ovary syndrome, an endocrine disorder that can cause women to stop ovulating, gain unusual weight, develop irregular periods or skin problems and grow abnormal facial and body hair.
Hussain struggles to describe how people ridiculed her in her community in Kashmir, where infertility is taboo.
“An infertile woman is generally viewed as incomplete with a notion of having a curse bestowed for some misdeed,” she says tearfully.
Dr. Ashraf Ganaie, an endocrinologist at Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences, says plenty of other women share Hussain’s problem amid the decades-old conflict and related uncertainties of life in the Kashmir Valley, a disputed territory between India and Pakistan.
He says an unpublished study that he supervised attributed 90 percent of infertility cases in the valley to polycystic ovary syndrome and related diseases, 5 percent to premature ovarian failure and another 5 percent to other stressors in life.
“In the last few years, we have received more than 150 women who suffer from premature ovarian failure,” he says.
Clinical psychologist Iram Nazir says that stress can negatively affect women’s hormonal levels. Read full article.
