What is "ovarian hyper-stimulation syndrome" or "OHSS"?
Ovarian hyper-stimulation syndrome is really too much of a good thing. The good thing is a fertility medication that causes the ovary to produce follicles. Of course, that fertility medication contains a hormone called FSH, follicle stimulating hormone, and if you get too much of it then you get too many follicles being too stimulated, and therefore producing too many eggs. In a situation like that, after the ovulation occurs, what's left over in the ovary (which is normally called a corpus luteum) is now so plentiful, and there are so many of these corpora lutea, that they produce some substances in the body which cause a really bad PMS. So, I tell patients, "If you have one egg and you ovulate one, then you'll have a certain amount of PMS. Now, imagine that you've just produced 20 or 30 of these eggs. Then you'll have that same PMS times 20 or 30." So, that would be where the same kind of bloating and the same kind of symptoms that a woman would normally have, with abdominal pain and fluid retention and so on, is amplified 20 or 30 times. This is why ovarian hyper-stimulation syndrome causes fluid retention, lots of abdominal pain, and in some cases fluid shifts. In severe cases, the patients can be quite nauseous and sometimes cannot keep down fluids, and we have to admit them to the hospital for IV fluid hydration. However, typically the syndrome passes on its own about two weeks after ovulation, and there typically are no long-term consequences.
