PLL’s Sasha Pieterse Recalls Gaining 70 Pounds at Age 17

“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,” the Geek Charming actress explained. “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 estrogen will be really high, you’ll have really low vitamin D levels, you’ll be deficient in a lot of things.”

But that isn’t all that PCOS affects.

As Sasha put it, “You won’t have a regular period, but the catch is, a lot of other things look different, so every woman everyone has a different experience with it. It could be your period, it could be weird hair growth, it could major gastro issues, it could be crazy cysts on your ovaries, it could be weight gain…I had a lot of those outward symptoms that everyone could see.”