Find your PCOS type
Nine questions about your energy, your skin, your cycle and your stress. No blood tests needed, no email gate, and matching more than one type is normal.
Written by Sarah CollinsLast updated
Nine questions, weighted across the four common PCOS drivers — insulin-resistant, inflammatory, adrenal and post-pill. You get a percentage against each one, on this page, straight away, with no email required. Most people match more than one. It is a way to organise symptoms you already recognise, not a diagnosis.
Before you start
None of the nine questions need a blood test, a scan, or a number off a scale. They ask how your body has behaved, because behaviour is what the four drivers actually differ on.
Your result appears on this page the moment you finish it. There is no email step in front of it, and there is no email step after it either.
Nothing leaves this browser tab. The scoring runs in your browser, this site is a set of static files with no reader database behind it, and there is nowhere for your answers to be sent — see the privacy notice for the long version.
Answer for how things have been over the last few months. If you are on hormonal birth control now, answer for how things were before you started, and read your result knowing the pill quiets most of what is being asked about here.
The nine questions
Scored
Your result
The percentages are a pattern match against your own answers, not a probability and not a test result. Your scored profile is marked below.
The four drivers, and what each one means for you
These four names are a practical grouping used to decide which advice applies to whom. They are not a clinical classification, and none of them will appear in your medical notes.
Insulin-resistant
Blood sugar and insulin signalling
Your answers describe a blood-sugar pattern: energy that falls off a cliff a couple of hours after carbohydrate, hunger that arrives with urgency rather than politely, and the skin and family-history markers that tend to travel alongside it.
Carb cravings, energy crashes, weight that centres on the middle, skin darkening at the neck.
Take to your appointment. Ask whether fasting insulin can be run alongside fasting glucose and HbA1c. Glucose is the number that stays normal longest, so it can read fine while insulin is working hard to keep it there.
- Diet, Meal Plans & RecipesWhat blunts the post-meal swing, and what to put on a plate on a Tuesday.
- Weight & Insulin ResistanceWhy the standard advice stalls when insulin is the driver.
- Supplements & MedicationsInositol, berberine and metformin — studied doses and who should skip each.
Inflammatory
Chronic low-grade inflammation
Your answers describe symptoms that behave like inflammation. They show up in your joints, your head and your gut as much as in your cycle, and they move with what you eat and what you catch.
Joint aches, headaches, gut symptoms, skin flares, unexplained fatigue.
Take to your appointment. Worth raising: thyroid function, a coeliac screen, and iron and vitamin D. Each produces the same tired-and-achy picture, each is treatable in its own right, and thyroid and prolactin have to be checked anyway before PCOS can be diagnosed.
- Diet, Meal Plans & RecipesHow to test whether a specific food is involved, in weeks rather than forever.
- Symptoms, Skin & HairSkin, gut and fatigue, and the mechanism each one runs on.
- Supplements & MedicationsWhat the trials found, including the ones that found nothing.
Adrenal
Stress axis and DHEA-S
Your answers track your stress axis more closely than your plate. Symptoms rise in a hard month and settle in an easier one, and your evenings run wired and exhausted at the same time.
Normal testosterone but raised DHEA-S, symptoms that track your stress, wired-but-tired evenings.
Take to your appointment. Ask whether DHEA-S has been measured, not only total testosterone. DHEA-S comes from the adrenal glands rather than the ovaries, and it is the one that is often raised in this pattern.
- Movement, Sleep & StressTraining that lowers cortisol instead of adding to it, plus sleep and stress.
- Symptoms, Skin & HairAndrogen symptoms when testosterone itself is not the raised number.
- Types & DiagnosisWhich labs to ask for, and how to read the ones you already have.
Post-pill
Androgen rebound after hormonal birth control
Your answers put the change after hormonal birth control rather than before it. That timing matters, because an androgen rebound in the months after stopping and PCOS that was quietly there all along can look identical from the inside.
Cycles and skin were fine on the pill, then broke down in the months after stopping.
Take to your appointment. Tell your clinician the month you stopped and what your cycles were like before you ever started. That timeline changes how the same set of results gets read.
- Types & DiagnosisThe Rotterdam criteria, and what a diagnosis needs before it is one.
- Symptoms, Skin & HairPost-pill acne and hair changes, and what the timeline usually looks like.
- Fertility & CyclesTracking ovulation while a cycle is still finding its feet.
How PCOS is actually diagnosed
The Rotterdam criteria need two of the three features below, and they need other causes ruled out first. That is why a questionnaire cannot do it: two of the three are only visible on an examination, a blood test, or a scan.
| Feature | What it looks like | How it is checked |
|---|---|---|
| Irregular or absent ovulation | Long cycles, unpredictable cycles, or periods that stop | Your cycle history, sometimes with a progesterone blood test |
| Raised androgens | Coarse hair on the face or body, deep jawline acne, thinning at the crown — or the same picture showing up in bloodwork | Examination plus androgen bloodwork |
| Polycystic ovary morphology | Nothing you can feel. It is not the same as having ovarian cysts, and it is not painful. | Pelvic ultrasound, or an AMH blood test in adults, which the 2023 International Evidence-Based Guideline for the Assessment and Management of PCOS accepts in its place. It is not used to diagnose adolescents, whose ovaries normally look this way. |
What this quiz cannot tell you
- Whether you have PCOS. It cannot count follicles, read your androgens, or check a cycle history against a criterion, and it cannot rule PCOS out either.
- Whether something else is behind your symptoms. Thyroid disease, raised prolactin, non-classic congenital adrenal hyperplasia and Cushing's syndrome overlap with this picture and are excluded with tests, not with questions.
- What is happening underneath hormonal birth control. It suppresses most of what these nine questions ask about, so a result taken while you are on it describes the medication as much as it describes you.
- What to take. There is no supplement, dose, or protocol anywhere in this result, and a quiz is not the thing that should decide one.
What to do with your result
- Write down your top two, not your top one. Overlap is the normal case, not a tie to break.
- Take the "take to your appointment" line from each of them with you. A specific question about a specific test uses a ten-minute appointment better than "I think I have PCOS".
- Start with the reading listed under your strongest match, change one thing, and give it a few weeks before you decide whether it did anything.
- Retake it if your circumstances change — coming off hormonal birth control, a long stressful stretch, a new diagnosis. The pattern moves, and so should the answer.
The newsletter is not open for signups yet — the delivery is still being set up. When it is, it optional, it comes after your result, and it was never the price of seeing it.