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.
Read The full text of the New York Times article.