PLL’s Sasha Pieterse Gets Real About Her Struggles With PCOS

She’s a fighter!

Many women suffer from a painful condition called PCOS (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome), Pretty Little Liars actress Sasha Pieterse is no different.

Recently, the now 27-year-old spoke out about her struggles with the condition particularly at the age of 17 when she starred as Alison Di Laurentis in the ABC Family hit show Pretty Little Liars.

Speaking to Taylor Lautner and his wife Taylor on their podcast The Squeeze, Sasha revealed: “This is part of the health issues that I was speaking of while I was going through Pretty Little Liars. So when I mean it was documented it was like, the changes that were happening to me were documented on camera.”

 

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PCOS is a reproductive hormone imbalance that affects 1 in 5 women of childbearing age in Ireland according to the HSE. Some of the signs and symptoms of PCOS include irregular or light period or no periods at all, difficulty getting pregnant, excessive hair growth (hirsutism), weight gain, thinning hair and hair loss from the head and oily skin or acne.

Explaining the effects PCOS had on her body Sasha said: “I never had a regular period ever and I was just always told by gynaecologists that I was just young. Like, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll regulate.”

But, that wasn’t the case for the teenage actress.

She said: “When I turned, it was probably around 15-16, that I started noticing a difference in just my metabolism in general. At 17, I gained 70 pounds in the year, for no reason. There was no explanation for it.”

 

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Sasha felt her voice wasn’t being heard among her doctors who blamed her for her weight gain. After seeing 15 different gynaecologists she was finally referred to an endocrinologist.

She said: “It was the most frustrating experience and disheartening because no matter what I did, no matter how well I behave, no matter how great I treated my body, things were actually getting worse rather than better, it was very very confusing. So after a long process…someone recommended that I go to an endocrinologist.”

It was here that she was diagnosed with PCOS, a disease that Sasha didn’t know existed at the time. Chatting to the Taylor’s she said: “I was like what’s that? I’d never heard of PCOS before. And it’s a disease, it’s not curable, it can be dormant, that’s—at this stage—that’s what they know.”

 

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She continued on saying: “And the most frustrating part about this is that it’s fairly easy to diagnose. And really what it is, it’s a hormone imbalance, it’s a hormone disease and it’s so easy to see because your testosterone or your oestrogen will be really high, you’ll have really low vitamin D levels, you’ll be deficient in a lot of things.”

Well done for speaking up Sasha!