Health
Related: About this forumPuberty Before Age 10: A New ‘Normal’?
For many parents of early-developing girls, normal is a crazy-making word, especially when uttered by a doctor; it implies that the patient, or patients mother, should quit being neurotic and accept that not much can be done. Allomong listened intently. He nodded and took notes, asking Tracee detailed questions about her birth-control history and validating her worst fears by mentioning the extremely high levels of estrogen-mimicking chemicals in the food and water supply. After about 20 minutes he asked Ainsley to lie on a table. There he performed a lengthy physical exam that involved testing the strength in Ainsleys arms and legs while she held small glass vials filled with compounds like cortisol, estrogen and sugar. (Kinesiologists believe that weak muscles indicate illness, and that a patients muscles will test as weaker when he or she is holding a substance that contributes to health problems.)
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Now most researchers seem to agree on one thing: Breast budding in girls is starting earlier. The debate has shifted to what this means. Puberty, in girls, involves three events: the growth of breasts, the growth of pubic hair and a first period. Typically the changes unfold in that order, and the process takes about two years. But the data show a confounding pattern. While studies have shown that the average age of breast budding has fallen significantly since the 1970s, the average age of first period, or menarche, has remained fairly constant, dropping to only 12.5 from 12.8 years. Why would puberty be starting earlier yet ending more or less at the same time?
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 isnt 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 Pyles 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, theres 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.
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/magazine/puberty-before-age-10-a-new-normal.html?pagewanted=all
no_hypocrisy
(46,080 posts)1) the increased estrogen in water that can't be filtered out. The estrogen originates in birth control pills that are digested and the estrogen is then excreted and added to the water supply.
2) the pseudo-estrogen found in numerous BPA products.
My friend's daughter started to "bud" at age 9 seventeen years ago and he thought it was unusual.
alp227
(32,018 posts)maybe we should start attacking Sandra Fluke as a polluter (definitely less offensive than what Limbaugh said)?
KT2000
(20,576 posts)Endocrine disrupting chemicals are everywhere and new products are being developed. Industry has fought successfully to stop any requirement for testing their products for endocrine disrupting effects. They have stopped health safety efforts for decades now and they will continue to do so. It is the same as the climate denialists.
Read the environmental health literature (which is sequestered from medical literature) and that is what the future looks like. It is not pretty.
mzteris
(16,232 posts)It may become "the norm", but it is still abnormal.
The other factor, I think, that may be contributing, is the lack of exercise and the rise in obesity.
Girls have to reach a certain "fat percentage" to enter menarche. (Or that's the way it used to be.) So girls who aren't running around outside and getting lots of exercise will reach that percentage earlier and earlier. That's why a lot of female athletes experience amenorrhea, their body fat is "too low" & it's why some girls are such late bloomers, they're too thin.
FirstLight
(13,360 posts)my daughter has an endocrine affecting disorder, and it can cause precocious puberty...and yet? the last time we did her blood-work her hormones looked normal, but she's definitely got buds and hips shaping up, and has some hair under her arms and smells like a growing girl now...she only turned 10 in January....
we see her endocrinologist in the summer, and will have to wait and see what the detailed tests say about growth hormone
and even though we avoid growth hormone in milk, etc... how much IS environmental? yikes.
mzteris
(16,232 posts)given to cows and chickens and other "meat" animals are significant contributors to this phenomena.
I have a lot of friends who are all into "natural foods" - not the vegetarian ones- but the ones who raise their own chickens and only buy "organic" meat from farmers they know. None of their children have entered "early puberty" (granted it IS a relatively small sample size and as some of our health group friends like to say, this is merely anecdotal . . . but still, food for thought [no pun intended!]).
flamingdem
(39,313 posts)I wonder if that is being documented.