Anti-Müllerian Hormone

AMH at a glance

What is AMH?

Anti-Müllerian hormone, sometimes written as AMH and occasionally still called Müllerian inhibiting substance in older papers, is a protein hormone produced inside the ovaries by the cells that surround your developing eggs. In medical terms it belongs to the transforming growth factor beta family, though the more useful way to think about it is as a signal your ovaries send out about how much reserve they are still carrying.

Its first job happens long before any of this matters to you. In a developing foetus, AMH determines whether the Müllerian ducts go on to form the uterus and fallopian tubes or are broken down so that male reproductive organs can develop instead. That early role is why the hormone got its name, and it is also why AMH is measured in newborns and children in some specialist settings.

After puberty the picture changes. AMH levels in women rise through adolescence, peak somewhere in the mid-twenties and then decline gradually for the rest of the reproductive years until they become undetectable around the menopause. That slow, one-directional curve is precisely what makes AMH useful as a marker.

What does AMH measure?

AMH measures the hormone given off by the follicles that have just started to grow, and from that it estimates how many eggs you have left in total. The link works because those early-growing follicles are drawn steadily from your resting pool, so a bigger reserve keeps more of them in circulation at any moment and produces a higher reading. Nothing in the test counts your resting eggs directly, which is why AMH is best understood as a close proxy rather than a tally.

This is worth being precise about, because the shorthand “AMH measures your fertility” causes a lot of unnecessary distress. AMH is a count, not a quality score. It tells you about quantity of eggs, not their chromosomal health, and it says nothing at all about whether your fallopian tubes are open, whether your uterus is receptive or whether ovulation is happening reliably each month.

Where is AMH produced?

In women, AMH is made by the granulosa cells, the layer of cells that wraps around each egg inside its follicle. Production comes almost entirely from the preantral follicles, which are microscopic, and the small antral ones measuring roughly two to ten millimetres, which are the follicles a clinic counts on an ultrasound scan. The truly dormant follicles, the primordial ones that make up the vast bulk of your reserve, produce none at all, and a follicle that grows on towards ovulation switches its production off again.

So AMH is given off during a narrow window in the life of each follicle, and that is exactly what makes it useful. Follicles leave the dormant pool at a rate that tracks how big that pool still is, which is why the hormone works as an indirect read on a reserve nobody can measure directly. The overlap with what a scan can see is the reason the two measures agree so closely, since a blood test and an antral follicle count are largely counting the same group of follicles by different means. It also explains why AMH stays so steady across your cycle: it comes from the follicles you are not using this month rather than the one heading towards release.

AMH comes from follicles that have just begun to grow, not from the dormant ones that make up most of your reserve, which is why it works as an estimate rather than a count.

AMH and ovarian reserve

Ovarian reserve is the term for the pool of eggs you have remaining, and it is a genuinely finite thing. You are born with every egg you will ever have, somewhere in the region of one to two million, and that number falls continuously through childhood and adulthood whether or not you are ovulating.

No blood test can count the dormant follicles themselves, so every measure of ovarian reserve is an estimate. AMH has become the standard blood marker for that reserve because it correlates closely with antral follicle count on ultrasound and because, unlike Follicle Stimulating Hormone (FSH), it does not need to be taken on a specific cycle day to be interpretable. Fertility clinics generally use the two together, alongside a scan, rather than relying on either alone.

The honest limitation is this. Ovarian reserve is about supply, not about outcome. A woman with a modest reserve who ovulates well can conceive readily, and a woman with a generous reserve can struggle for reasons that have nothing to do with egg numbers.

AMH in men

Men produce AMH too, in the Sertoli cells of the testes, and before birth those levels are very high because that is when the hormone is doing its structural work. Concentrations stay elevated through early infancy, decline slowly through childhood and then drop sharply at puberty as testosterone rises.

In adult men AMH is rarely a useful test on its own, which is reflected in how people actually use it. Of the AMH results in our dataset, only one came from a man. Where it does get measured in men, it is usually in specialist paediatric or andrology settings, to confirm the presence of functioning testicular tissue or to investigate conditions such as persistent Müllerian duct syndrome, androgen insensitivity syndrome or congenital hypogonadotropic hypogonadism. If you are a man looking at your hormones more broadly, Testosterone (total) and Sex Hormone Binding Globulin (SHBG) will tell you considerably more.

How does AMH affect fertility?

AMH does not affect your fertility so much as report on one part of it. A low level does not cause difficulty conceiving, and raising it artificially would not make conception easier, because the hormone is a readout rather than a lever.

Where it earns its place is in prediction of a specific kind. In IVF, AMH is one of the best available predictors of how many eggs will be collected after ovarian stimulation, which is why almost every fertility clinic measures it before starting treatment. NICE guidance uses AMH at or below 5.4 pmol/L to flag a likely low response to stimulation, and above 25.0 pmol/L to flag a likely high response. Both figures are about the treatment, not about you.

Research in women undergoing IVF has found that those with higher AMH tend to have more eggs retrieved and better fertilisation and embryo transfer rates. The relationship holds at the population level and blurs considerably at the individual one.

What AMH can and can’t tell you about your fertility

What AMH gives you a is reasonable estimate of egg quantity for your age, a sense of how your reserve compares with other women in the same age bracket and a useful prediction of how your ovaries would respond to stimulation if you went down the IVF or egg freezing route. Tested more than once over several years, it also shows you the direction and pace of your own decline, which is far more informative than any single reading.

What AMH cannot tell you is the quality of your eggs, which is driven mainly by age and for which no blood test exists. It cannot tell you whether you will conceive naturally this year or next. It cannot give you a date for your menopause, only a rough steer on whether you are likely to be earlier or later than average. And it tells you nothing at all about your fallopian tubes, your uterus or your partner’s sperm, which shape your chances every bit as much as egg numbers do.

AMH answers questions about egg quantity and none about egg quality, and knowing which column your question sits in saves a lot of unnecessary worry.

What is a normal AMH level?

There is no single normal AMH level, and any page that gives you one number is oversimplifying. Your result is assessed against a range set for your age group, because a value that is entirely unremarkable at 42 would be genuinely unusual at 26.

Our laboratory applies six age-specific bands, and the table below shows them alongside their ng/mL equivalents and how many Forth results were assessed against each. When you get your own result, the range printed next to it is the one that applies to you.

Forth laboratory reference ranges. Conversion used: 1 ng/mL = 7.14 pmol/L.

Alongside those bands, two numbers from NICE are worth knowing because they appear constantly in fertility conversations. An AMH of 5.4 pmol/L or below suggests a low response to ovarian stimulation, and above 25.0 pmol/L suggests a high one. You will sometimes see these quoted as 0.8 and 3.6 ng/mL rather than the exact arithmetic conversion, which is simply rounding rather than a different standard.

Normal AMH levels by age

Age is the single strongest influence on AMH, and our own data shows that decline with unusual clarity. Across the whole group the median result was 11.2 pmol/L, but that headline figure hides a steep gradient underneath it.

Bar hart showing median AMH falling from 28.5 pmol/L at 21 to 25 down to 2.0 pmol/L at 46 and over, which is why your result only means something read against your own age group.

Forth customer data. 

The same pattern shows up in published research. One study of  22,920 women found medians of about 17.9 pmol/L at 30, 10.0 at 35 and 3.6 at 40, and our own age brackets follow that curve closely from the late twenties onwards. That study is much larger than ours, though it drew on women attending a hospital and used a different laboratory assay, so the two are not quite like for like. In the Forth data the drop works out at roughly 1.3 pmol/L for every year of age, steepest through the thirties and flattening towards the bottom because there is not much left to lose.

Two things matter when you compare yourself to any of these numbers. The mean sits well above the median in every bracket, pulled up by a few very high results often linked to PCOS, so the median is the fairer figure to measure yourself against. And each bracket covers five years, which means a woman of 31 and a woman of 35 appear in the same row without being expected to return the same number.

AMH units explained: pmol/L vs ng/mL

A surprising amount of AMH anxiety comes down to arithmetic. You get a UK result of 12, read an American article describing anything under 1.0 as concerning and conclude something alarming, when in fact the two numbers are on completely different scales.

What does pmol/L mean?

Picomoles per litre is a measure of how many molecules of a substance are present in a given volume of blood. A picomole is a trillionth of a mole, which sounds abstract until you remember that hormones work at genuinely tiny concentrations. UK and most European laboratories report AMH this way, and it is the unit you will see on a Forth report.

The alternative, ng/mL, measures mass rather than molecules. Nanograms per millilitre is standard in the United States and in a large share of the published research, which is why so much of what you read online appears to be using numbers ten times smaller than yours.

How to convert pmol/L to ng/mL

The conversion is a single fixed factor. To go from ng/mL to pmol/L you multiply by 7.14, and to go the other way you divide by the same number. Nothing else changes, and no clinical judgement is involved.

Conversion factor used by Forth’s laboratory: 1 ng/mL = 7.14 pmol/L.

One practical caution. Different laboratory assays can produce slightly different AMH values from the same sample, so comparing a result from one provider directly against a result from another is not quite like for like. Retesting with the same laboratory is the cleaner way to track change over time.

How can I measure my AMH levels?

You can measure AMH with a straightforward blood test, either through your GP or fertility clinic if there is a clinical reason, or privately if you want the information for your own planning. Because AMH is measured in the liquid part of your blood, you will sometimes see it written as a serum AMH test, which is the same thing.

Are AMH tests accurate?

AMH is a robust measurement, and modern automated assays are reproducible enough that a result you receive from an accredited laboratory can be taken at face value. The question most people really want answered, though, is whether a sample they collect themselves at home holds up against one taken by a phlebotomist. Our own results say it does. Comparing finger-prick samples against venous ones, the two methods produced medians that were effectively identical, 11.7 pmol/L against 11.6 pmol/L, and once the comparison is adjusted for age the gap between them falls below 1%. The classification of those results matched just as closely, with 90.6% of finger-prick samples coming back within range for that woman’s age against 90.2% of venous ones.

Home finger-prick samples returned a median of 11.7 pmol/L against 11.6 for venous ones: how the blood is collected does not change what the laboratory measures.

Forth customer data, adjusted for age.

That is what you would expect, because the analysis itself is identical whichever way the blood arrived. There are still real reasons a result can read lower or higher than the true picture, and it is better to know them than to be blindsided. Sample handling matters, which is why home tests come with specific instructions about how much blood to collect and how quickly to post it. Assay differences between laboratories mean two providers can return slightly different numbers from the same blood. And some medications and treatments genuinely change what is there to be measured, including chemotherapy and, to a smaller degree, long-term hormonal contraception.

A result that surprises you is worth repeating rather than accepting or dismissing outright. If your number is far from what you expected given your age and your cycle history, a repeat test with the same laboratory a couple of months later will tell you whether you are looking at a genuine finding or a one-off.

Why is an AMH test done?

The commonest reason is fertility planning of one sort or another. Before IVF or ICSI, AMH helps the clinic choose a stimulation protocol and set expectations about how many eggs are likely to be collected. Before egg freezing it does much the same job, informing how many cycles might be needed.

Beyond treatment, plenty of women test simply because they want information while they still have options open. If you are weighing up whether to try for a baby now or in three years, knowing whether your reserve looks typical for your age or noticeably reduced is a genuinely useful input into that decision.

AMH is also used to investigate a suspected high result in the context of PMOS, to assess ovarian function before chemotherapy or pelvic surgery that could affect the ovaries and to help make sense of very early or unexplained menopausal symptoms.

What does an AMH test tell you?

It tells you where your ovarian reserve sits relative to other women your age, and it gives you a baseline you can measure future results against. Those two things together are the real value, and the second one is easy to underestimate.

A single AMH result is a snapshot taken on one morning of one year. Tested again in two or three years, the same marker tells you the direction and pace of your own decline, which is information no reference range can give you. The trend is where the story actually lives, and it is the reason we built the platform around tracking rather than one-off numbers.

When should AMH levels be checked?

There is no universally right age, though the value of the information changes depending on where you are. In your late twenties and thirties, an AMH result is most useful when you have a decision in front of you, whether that is timing a first pregnancy, considering egg freezing or trying to understand why conception is taking longer than expected.

It becomes clinically important if you are about to start fertility treatment, if you have a family history of early menopause, if you have had ovarian surgery or treatment that could affect your ovaries, or if your periods have changed in a way that suggests your hormones are shifting. NHS advice is to see your GP if you have not conceived after a year of trying, and sooner if you are 36 or over or already know you may have a fertility problem.

Testing very young, with no particular question in mind, tends to generate more anxiety than insight. The number will be high, it will not change your decisions and it will still need repeating when the decisions actually arrive.

Do AMH levels change during your cycle?

Not enough to matter for how you use the result. Studies measuring AMH repeatedly through a cycle do find small, statistically detectable movement, but it follows no consistent pattern from one woman to the next, which is why clinical practice treats AMH as testable on any day. That is a meaningfully different claim from saying AMH never moves, and the distinction is worth keeping. The reason it holds so steady is anatomical. Unlike Oestradiol (Oestrogen), Luteinising Hormone (LH) or Progesterone, all of which rise and fall sharply across a month, AMH comes from a large pool of small follicles that are not taking part in this cycle at all.

Our own results point the same way. Among women who recorded which day of their cycle they tested on, the median AMH was 11.25 pmol/L in the first five days, 10.5 pmol/L between days 15 and 21 and 10.0 pmol/L in the final week. These are different women in each band rather than the same woman sampled repeatedly, so this shows that cycle day does not shift the population picture rather than proving your own level is fixed.

Line chart showing Oestradiol and FSH rising and falling sharply across a cycle while AMH barely moving, which is why it can be tested on any day.

Forth customer data. Bands with fewer than ten results are not shown.

In practice this means you can take an AMH test on any day, including while you are bleeding, which removes one of the more frustrating logistical barriers to hormone testing. If you are testing AMH as part of a wider fertility panel, other markers in that panel may still have a preferred window, and your kit instructions will say so.

How to read your AMH results

Start with the unit, because everything else follows from it. Check whether your report is in pmol/L or ng/mL, and if you are comparing against something you read online, convert before you compare.

Then find the reference range printed beside your result and check that it is the one for your age group rather than a generic band. After that, look at where inside the range you sit. A result of 6 pmol/L in a range that starts at 4.1 is technically normal, but it is sitting near the floor, and that is a different conversation from a result sitting comfortably in the middle.

Last, treat the label as an opening question rather than a closing verdict. Low, normal and high are useful shorthand for where a number falls against a population range, and they were never designed to describe a person.

What biomarkers should I test with AMH?

AMH on its own gives you one column of a much wider spreadsheet. Ovarian reserve is only part of what determines whether conception happens, and several of the most common reversible causes of difficulty sit entirely outside it.

• Follicle Stimulating Hormone (FSH) and Luteinising Hormone (LH) show how hard your brain is working to drive the ovaries. A rising FSH alongside a falling AMH is a more convincing signal than either alone.
• Oestradiol (Oestrogen) and Progesterone tell you whether ovulation is happening and whether the second half of your cycle is working properly.
• Prolactin is a well-recognised and treatable cause of irregular cycles when raised.
• TSH, Free T4 and Free T3 influence cycle regularity and pregnancy outcomes more than most people realise.
• Testosterone (total), SHBG and the Free Androgen Index are the markers that move the conversation forward if a high AMH has raised the question of PMOS.
• Vitamin D (25 OH) and Ferritin are worth having on the same report because deficiency is common and straightforward to correct.

If your questions are less about conception and more about what your hormones are doing across a whole cycle, MyFORM® uses two timed samples to map how your hormones actually behave rather than capturing them once and hoping the timing was right.

Forth Anti-Müllerian Hormone tests

Both of the tests below include AMH, analysed in UKAS-accredited laboratories to NHS standards, with results reviewed by our clinical team.

AMH Blood Test: a single-biomarker test for anyone who wants a clear read on their ovarian reserve, whether you are preparing for IVF, considering egg freezing or simply want a baseline you can build on later.

Female Fertility Blood Test: a nine-biomarker panel that places AMH alongside the reproductive and thyroid hormones that shape cycle regularity and conception, for a considerably fuller picture than AMH alone can offer.

Low and high AMH levels

Most of the questions we see about AMH come down to the same underlying one, which is what a result outside the expected range actually means for you. A low result is not a diagnosis of infertility and a high result is not a guarantee of an easy conception. AMH is one input into a fuller picture that also includes your age, your other hormones and, if you are having fertility treatment, an ultrasound follicle count.

The first thing worth knowing is how uncommon either outcome is. Across results from women who tested with us, 6.7% came back low and 3.4% came back high, which leaves the overwhelming majority sitting exactly where you would expect for their age.

Nine in ten results came back normal for that woman’s age, so a result outside the expected range is genuinely uncommon.

One thing to be clear about before those percentages travel any further. Each result here was judged against the reference range for that woman’s age, which is why so many land in the normal band. Research that instead applies one fixed cut-off to everybody, commonly 1.2 ng/mL, produces a very different picture, with around a quarter of 30-year-olds and roughly three quarters of 40-year-olds falling below it. Both numbers are correct and they are answering different questions, and mixing them up is the source of a great deal of unnecessary alarm.

What causes low AMH?

The most common cause of a low AMH is simply age, because the pool of follicles producing it shrinks year on year and the decline accelerates through the late thirties. That is not a disease, and framing it as one does nobody any favours.

Beyond age, several things genuinely reduce ovarian reserve: 

• Chemotherapy and radiotherapy to the pelvis, which can damage follicles directly, sometimes permanently.
• Surgery on the ovaries, including for endometriomas, which removes tissue and with it some reserve. 
• Autoimmune conditions and certain genetic factors. These include fragile X premutation and Turner syndrome, associated with earlier decline, and Crohn’s disease, which has been linked with reduced ovarian reserve in women of reproductive age.
• Smoking: the most clearly established modifiable factor, with current smokers found to have around a 44% reduction in AMH compared with non-smokers in women aged 38 to 50. 
• Low vitamin D, which has also been associated with lower AMH across multiple studies. 
• Body weight: often listed alongside these, though the evidence there is genuinely divided and we look at it more closely further down this page.

What causes low AMH at a young age?

This is the question that generates the most worry, and it deserves a careful answer. A low AMH in your twenties or early thirties usually reflects one of three things: 

• a naturally smaller reserve that you were simply born with
• an identifiable cause such as previous ovarian surgery or cancer treatment
• the earliest signal of primary ovarian insufficiency.

Our data adds a detail that surprises most people. Among the women under 30 who tested with us, 12 had a result flagged low, which is 9.8%, and their median result was 6 pmol/L. Younger women are not the least likely group to be flagged low, because each result is judged against the range for that age, and the bar is set higher when you are younger.

A low result is most common at 26 to 30 and least common at 41 to 45, because “low” always means low for your own age.

That table shows how often the label is applied, not how much reserve each group has, and the numbers in the youngest and oldest brackets rest on relatively few tests. Judged against a single fixed threshold instead, the pattern reverses completely and older women come off far worse. The point is that “low” always means low for your age, and the bar sits higher when you are younger.

A low AMH at a young age is a reason to have a proper conversation with your GP or a fertility specialist, and it may change how you plan. It is not, on its own, a diagnosis of anything.

Symptoms of low AMH

Low AMH itself has no symptoms, which is precisely why it is measured rather than felt. What you may notice are the effects of a declining reserve on your cycle: periods that become shorter, less predictable or further apart, and in some cases hot flushes, disturbed sleep or mood changes if oestrogen is falling alongside it.

Difficulty conceiving is often what brings people to the test in the first place, though it is worth saying clearly that many women with low AMH conceive without difficulty. If your periods have changed noticeably before the age of 40, that is worth discussing with your GP regardless of what your AMH shows.

Your options if you have low AMH

The first thing to do is not to treat the number as a countdown. Low AMH means fewer eggs available at any one time, not zero eggs and not a closing door, and plenty of women with results in the low range conceive naturally.

If you are trying to conceive now, a low result is a reasonable prompt to seek advice sooner rather than waiting out the full year, particularly if you are 36 or over. If you are not trying yet, it is worth having a proper conversation about your timeline and about whether egg freezing makes sense for you, understanding that a lower reserve usually means more cycles to collect the same number of eggs. And in either case, the supporting picture matters: getting Vitamin D (25 OH) into a healthy range, addressing thyroid function and stopping smoking all support ovarian health even though none of them will rebuild reserve.

Can you increase your AMH levels?

You cannot meaningfully increase your ovarian reserve, because the number of follicles you have is fixed from birth and only ever moves in one direction.

What you can do is stop actively depleting it faster than necessary, and make sure the rest of your reproductive system is working as well as it can. Those are real, worthwhile goals. They are just not the same as raising a number.

What affects your AMH levels?

Beyond the causes of low AMH listed above, three things come up constantly:

• Hormonal contraception: studies report reductions of roughly 19% to 31% among users, with one analysis of more than 9,000 women finding combined pills around 26% lower and the vaginal ring around 29%, while the non-hormonal copper coil showed no effect at all. The drop appears within three months of starting and looks temporary rather than a permanent loss of reserve, so if you are on the combined pill and your result comes back at the low end, retesting two to three months after stopping gives you a truer number.
• Body weight: a review of thirteen studies in healthy women with regular cycles found five reporting lower AMH with obesity and eight finding no meaningful difference, and concluded the effect should be treated as uncertain. Our own results sit with the larger group: a median of 11.2 pmol/L at a BMI of 18.5 to 24.9, 11.0 between 25 and 29.9, and 12.0 at 30 or above.
• Cycle regularity: women reporting irregular periods had a median AMH of 20.0 pmol/L against 11.0 pmol/L in those with regular cycles, close to a doubling. That is the direction the literature predicts, since women with PMOS typically carry two to three times the AMH of women without it. Irregular periods have other causes too, and this comparison is not adjusted for age.
• 

Irregular cycles came with a median AMH of 20.0 pmol/L against 11.0 for regular ones, the pattern you would expect where PCOS is common.

What the evidence actually shows

The studies most often cited as showing that AMH can be raised are small, mostly observational and generally measuring something adjacent to what people hope they are measuring. Vitamin D supplementation in women with diminished reserve has shown modest changes in some trials, though the effect is inconsistent and the mechanism unclear. Dietary studies have reported slower decline in AMH among women eating more dairy, which is an association rather than a demonstrated cause.

Taken together, the picture is that lifestyle changes can plausibly slow the rate of decline and support the health of the follicles you still have. No intervention has been shown to create new follicles, and any product marketed on that promise is overstating its evidence.

Lifestyle factors that support ovarian health

None of the following will rebuild your reserve, and none is worth doing for the sake of a number. What they will do is protect the follicles you still have and put you in better shape for whatever you decide to do next.

• Stopping smoking: the change with the clearest evidence behind it, and the effect size is large enough to be worth the difficulty. 
• Getting your vitamin D into a healthy range: straightforward, cheap and worth doing on its own merits given how common deficiency is in the UK, where our research found that 61% of the population have below optimal vitamin D levels.
• Managing stress genuinely: psychological stress is associated with lower serum AMH in women being investigated for infertility, though the direction of that relationship is difficult to untangle. 
• Everyday basics: a diet with enough of the nutrients reproduction depends on, alcohol kept within sensible limits and regular movement without pushing into the territory where your periods stop.

What causes high AMH?

A high AMH usually means one of two things: you have a naturally generous ovarian reserve, or you have a larger than usual number of small follicles sitting in your ovaries and not maturing properly. The second scenario is the PMOS picture, and it is by far the most common explanation for a markedly raised result.

Less commonly, raised AMH can be seen with certain ovarian tumours, particularly granulosa cell tumours, which is one reason a very high result in a woman who does not fit the PMOS picture warrants proper clinical assessment rather than reassurance from a website.

In men, high AMH after puberty is unusual and can point to conditions such as persistent Müllerian duct syndrome, androgen insensitivity syndrome or testicular dysgenesis, all of which need specialist input.

Symptoms of high AMH

High AMH does not cause symptoms directly. When symptoms are present, they belong to whatever is driving the raised level, which in practice usually means PMOS. Those symptoms typically include:

• irregular or absent periods
• difficulty conceiving because ovulation is unpredictable
• excess hair growth on the face, chest or back
• persistent acne
• thinning hair on the scalp
• weight gain that feels disproportionate to what you are eating. 

Plenty of women with high AMH have none of these and are simply well supplied.

High AMH and PMOS

The link between PMOS and high AMH makes sense once you know where the hormone comes from. In PMOS, the ovaries accumulate a large number of small antral follicles that begin to develop and then stall before maturing. Since it is precisely those small follicles that produce AMH, having many more of them produces a much higher blood level.

This is why AMH is increasingly discussed as a potential marker for PMOS, and why a high result alongside irregular periods and signs of raised androgens is a meaningful combination rather than a coincidence. Our data shows that association clearly, with women reporting irregular cycles carrying almost double the median AMH of those with regular ones.

AMH now has a formal place in that assessment, which is a genuine change from a few years ago. The 2023 international evidence-based guideline accepts a raised AMH in adults as an alternative to an ultrasound scan when establishing polycystic ovarian morphology, and it is explicitly not recommended for that purpose in adolescents, because multifollicular ovaries are common and entirely normal in the teenage years.

A high AMH is still not a diagnosis on its own. You need two of the three features: irregular or absent ovulation, clinical or biochemical signs of raised androgens, and polycystic ovarian morphology established by scan or by AMH. Where irregular cycles and raised androgens are both present, neither a scan nor an AMH is needed. Our PMOS blood test is designed to give you the biochemical part of that picture to take to your GP. If you want to understand the condition more fully first, our guide to PMOS symptoms and diagnosis is a good starting point.

FAQs about AMH