Precocious Puberty

[Trey of Diamonds]

Puberty Before Age 10 - A New Normal?

To endocrinologists, girls who go through puberty early fall into two camps: girls with diagnosable disorders like central precocious puberty, and girls who simply develop on the early side of the normal curve. But the line between the groups is blurring. “There used to be a discrete gap between normal and abnormal, and there isn’t anymore,” Louise Green­span, a pediatric endocrinologist and co-author of the August 2010 Pediatrics paper, told me one morning in her office at Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco. Among the few tools available to help distinguish between so-called “normal” and “precocious” puberty are bone-age X-rays. To illustrate how they work, Greenspan pulled out a beautiful old book, Greulich and Pyle’s “Radiographic Atlas of Skeletal Development of the Hand and Wrist,” a standard text for pediatric endocrinologists. Each page showed an X-ray of a hand illustrating “bone age.” The smallest hand was from a newborn baby, the oldest from an adult female. “When a baby is born, there’s all this cartilage,” Greenspan said, pointing to large black gaps surrounding an array of delicate white bones. As the body grows, the pattern of black and white changes. The white bones lengthen, and the black interstices between them, some of which is cartilage, shrink. This process stops at the end of puberty, when the growth plates fuse.

Any thoughts as to why our children are growing up faster then "normal"? Is evolution changing the way we mature or are we reacting to our environment? Maybe it is a reaction to the changes we have made to our environment. Are these children any different than other children? Should they be treated differently?

 

[Revoltingest]

Criminy! Sounds rough for them.

 

[Alex_G]

Ye I believe there is a natural trend occuing with puberty happening at an increasingly younger age. Why I'm not too sure. Maybe girls are being exposed to chemicals that mimick oestrogen these days more so than ever before. Or maybe there is some complex psychologically stimulated neuro-hormonal activation happening from girls socially growing up much earlier, with all the media exposures and makeup and fashion pressures all around.

I however don't like to overuse terms like normal and abnormal, as they somewhat lose any recognisable meaning in this sort of context.

I know for one thing, the early puberty will mean girls will be 'reproductively active' for much longer, with this prolonged exposure to oestrogen they will be at increased risk of endometrial and breast cancer later in life. Also probably ovarian cancer too from the extended period of repeated ovulation.
Socially speaking there are many potential issues and risks too.
It makes us more aware of needing to offer HPV vaccine to younger girls to reduce the risk of cervical cancer. (as hpv is sexually transmitted)

The world is constantly changing and there is no inflexible norm that must be maintained in principle just because that's how things have been in the past. I mean the norm was to die in your 40s back in medieval times.

 

[beenie]

I often wonder about the hormones we put into our foods...meat, milk, etc. I can't believe it wouldn't have some affect on young girls.

 

[Revoltingest]

I often wonder about the hormones we put into our foods...meat, milk, etc. I can't believe it wouldn't have some affect on young girls.

Pesticides can mimic hormones too.

 

[beenie]

Pesticides can mimic hormones too.

Sure can. In our strive to have the biggest and the best, we have added poison and hormones to our foods, while stripping them of their nutrition. We eat way too much meat as a whole. Growing up, we only ate meat a few times a week; now many people eat meat two or three times a day. Processed foods, etc...we're setting ourselves up for a lot of problems in the future (I see the effects now as well).

In my home, my girls are on the later side of puberty; so far, three of my six daughters have passed 10.5 (third daughter is 10.5 right now). Oldest is 14 and is just showing early signs; she's quite petite, much like me. We have stuck to organic milk, meat, eggs, and as much of the fruits/veggies as we can. I don't know whether it has made a difference, but I'm not about to test the theory on the younger three.

 

[Revoltingest]

Go ahead.
I'll wager that God gave us children to experiment upon.

 

[Lindsey-Loo]

My roommate is a med student and she thinks it's all the growth hormones/steroids that are in the animals who become our meat, particularly chicken. Go figure.

 

[zenzero]

Friend ToD,

Any thoughts as to why our children are growing up faster then "normal"? Is evolution changing the way we mature or are we reacting to our environment? Maybe it is a reaction to the changes we have made to our environment. Are these children any different than other children? Should they be treated differently?____________

*child is the father of man* which means through evolution the responsibility of the next generation increases and so the level of maturity!

Love & rgds

 

[Sunstone]

Any thoughts as to why our children are growing up faster then "normal"?

Early puberty is a liberal plot to discredit the food industry. A liberal plot, I tell you!

 

[dawny0826]

I often wonder about the hormones we put into our foods...meat, milk, etc. I can't believe it wouldn't have some affect on young girls.

This is exactly what I was going to suggest.

 

[Songbird]

I thought I had read that not only are hormones/additives thought to be responsible, but that improved nutrition and childhood obesity are as well. Nutrition is relative, I know, but in terms of availability of enough nutrients, historically a higher percentage of kids were malnourished, which delayed puberty.

 

[Trey of Diamonds]

I thought I had read that not only are hormones/additives thought to be responsible, but that improved nutrition and childhood obesity are as well. Nutrition is relative, I know, but in terms of availability of enough nutrients, historically a higher percentage of kids were malnourished, which delayed puberty.

The article also said that hard times can cause early puberty. That seems counter to your point.

 

[Songbird]

The article also said that hard times can cause early puberty. That seems counter to your point.

It said hard times, as in stressful childhoods due to difficult homelives, not as in lean times.

And from page four:

"Girls who are overweight are more likely to enter puberty early than thinner girls, and the ties between obesity and puberty start at a very young age. "

 

[connermt]

Puberty Before Age 10 - A New Normal?



Any thoughts as to why our children are growing up faster then "normal"? Is evolution changing the way we mature or are we reacting to our environment? Maybe it is a reaction to the changes we have made to our environment. Are these children any different than other children? Should they be treated differently?

Artificial hormones in the beef

Seriously some think that's the cause. It might very well have something to do with it....

 

[Alex_G]

I thought I had read that not only are hormones/additives thought to be responsible, but that improved nutrition and childhood obesity are as well. Nutrition is relative, I know, but in terms of availability of enough nutrients, historically a higher percentage of kids were malnourished, which delayed puberty.

This makes some sense, as fat cells are a source of oestrogen in themselves. Obese girls will be exposed to higher background oestrogen levels, which could very well be important to the early awakening of their hypothalamic/pituitary/ovarian axis and thus precocious puberty.
Poor nutrition is also itself an independent factor that switches off the hypothalamic/pituitary/ovarian axis. Low bmi women such as those with anorexia nervosa don't have their regular periods and cannot get pregnant. It makes evolutionary sense that the body switches off the hormonal cycle when it knows it could not nutritionslly support a baby. Children of poor nutrition might very well have a delayed puberty relative to those with ample nutrition.

 

[Trey of Diamonds]

It said hard times, as in stressful childhoods due to difficult homelives, not as in lean times.

And from page four:

"Girls who are overweight are more likely to enter puberty early than thinner girls, and the ties between obesity and puberty start at a very young age. "

Not lean times as in not enough to eat but hard times yes.

Starting at the bottom of page 4.

Bruce Ellis, a professor of Family Studies and Human Development at the University of Arizona, discovered along with his colleagues a pattern of early puberty in girls whose parents divorced when those girls were between 3 and 8 years old and whose fathers were considered socially deviant (meaning they abused drugs or alcohol, were violent, attempted suicide or did prison time). In another study, published in 2011, Ellis and his colleagues showed that first graders who are most reactive to stress — kids whose pulse, respiratory rate and cortisol levels fluctuate most in response to environmental challenges — entered puberty earliest when raised in difficult homes. Evolutionary psychology offers a theory: A stressful childhood inclines a body toward early reproduction; if life is hard, best to mature young. But such theories are tough to prove.

I understood this to come from a natural occurance than when the species is in a harsh environment with a high mortality rate, repoductive ablitites occur earlier in order to ensure survival of the species. I would think that malnutrition would count as hard times. May poor nutrition is a better term though rather then full on malnutrition.

Maybe its a bell curve with early puberty on both ends of the curve. Times are bad; early puberty, times are good; early puberty.

 

[MysticSang'ha]

Puberty Before Age 10 - A New Normal?



Any thoughts as to why our children are growing up faster then "normal"? Is evolution changing the way we mature or are we reacting to our environment? Maybe it is a reaction to the changes we have made to our environment. Are these children any different than other children? Should they be treated differently?

I think environmental factors weigh heavily in the trend toward early puberty.

I kind of know what these little ones are going through. My grandmother, my mother, me, and my daughter all had our first periods by our 11th birthday. I'm now going through the early menopause that the women in my family have been prone to have too.

The most difficult thing really and truly is feeling so different from the other girls. I was 10, with breasts, and a tomboy who wore hand me downs and who also was incredibly bookish. I didn't really start "fitting in" with other girls until I was well into high school.

My daughter now at 13 has no body issues in spite of her early puberty, and NOW she's taking more of an interest in the boys her age.

I agree then that puberty isn't a clearly defined line that a child crosses, but a process. Although the article certainly shows the trend toward younger and younger girls now learning how to use maxi pads.

 

[Dezzie]

I often wonder about the hormones we put into our foods...meat, milk, etc. I can't believe it wouldn't have some affect on young girls.

I couldn't agree with you more.

 

[Falvlun]

I thought I had read that not only are hormones/additives thought to be responsible, but that improved nutrition and childhood obesity are as well. Nutrition is relative, I know, but in terms of availability of enough nutrients, historically a higher percentage of kids were malnourished, which delayed puberty.

That's what I was thinking too. It's not just what we eat, it's that we have a basically unlimited access to calories. It would be interesting if we had data from , say, the 1800's when there was a pretty distinct difference between classes who had as much to eat as they wanted, and those who went hungry. No hormones in the chicken then. I wonder if we'd see the rich girls, on average, starting puberty earlier than the poor ones.