In the News
Puberty Before Age 10: A New 'Normal'?
Elizabeth Weil, The New York Times, March 2012
A recent New York Times article reported on research being conducted on the growing trend of girls entering puberty at a younger age and the causes and ramifications of this "new normal."
The writer discussed research being conducted at the three BCERP sites — Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Kaiser Permanente of Northern California and Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York — that was published in the journal Pediatrics and showed that breast development is starting in girls at younger ages. According to the programs’ findings, by age 7, 10 percent of white girls, 23 percent of black girls, 15 percent of Hispanic girls and 2 percent of Asian girls had started developing breasts.
In an interview for the article, our own Dr. Frank Biro, lead author of the August 2010 Pediatrics paper and Director of Adolescent Medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, said that published research suggests to him that the early breast growth might be coming from non-ovarian estrogens. Cincinnati’s current BCERP research focuses on efforts to see if we can determine where the non-ovarian estrogens are coming from.
