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Mon 9 Aug, 2010 08:13 pm
Many Girls Now Begin Puberty at Age 7, 8
Rate of early onset has doubled for 7-year-old white girls, study finds
By Jenifer Goodwin
HealthDay Reporter
MONDAY, Aug. 9 (HealthDay News) -- The onset of puberty is continuing to drop among American girls, with many girls as young as 7 and 8 now showing the beginnings of breast development, new research shows.
Rising rates of childhood obesity -- long linked to earlier sexual development -- may be to blame, experts say.
In the study, more than 1,200 girls ages 6 to 8 from Cincinnati, East Harlem, N.Y. and San Francisco were examined on two occasions between 2004 and 2006 by two different female pediatricians or nurse practitioners who felt for the presence of breast tissue.
"We wanted to be careful not to mistake fatty deposits for actual breast tissue," explained study author Dr. Frank Biro, director of adolescent medicine at Cincinnati's Children's Hospital.
Among 7-year-olds, about 10.4 percent of white girls, 23.4 percent of black girls and almost 15 percent of Hispanic girls had started developing breasts, the team report in the September issue of Pediatrics. Among 8-year-olds, 18.3 percent of white girls, about 43 percent of black girls and just under 31 percent of Hispanic girls showed evidence of breast development.
The figures suggest a rise in early-onset puberty compared to similar studies conducted earlier.
For 7-year-old white girls, especially, they show a doubling of the rate from as recently as a decade ago, Biro said. One study found that about 5 percent of white 7-year-old girls and 10.5 percent of 8-year-olds were showing breast development.
For black girls, the rate of breast development in that study was 15.4 percent for 7-year-olds and 36.6 percent for 8-year-olds.
The earlier data did not include information on Hispanic girls.
Experts called the findings alarming. In terms of women's health, early puberty, including younger ages at menarche, or first menstrual cycle, is associated with a higher risk of breast cancer throughout the life span, Biro said.
In addition, developing early is associated with psychological and social pressures that young girls may be ill-equipped to handle, including sexual advances from older boys and men, said Dr. Marcia Herman-Giddens, adjunct professor of public health at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Girls may look older than their age, but mentally, they are much the same as other 7-and 8-year old girls, said Herman-Giddens, who led the earlier study.
"They really miss out on a good part of their childhood," she said. "When my study came out, I received very sad, poignant letters and e-mails from young women who had been early developers, how horrible it was to have older boys and young men hitting on them and sexual feelings they didn't understand."
What's driving the earlier maturation? Increasing weight at a young age seems to be a main culprit, Biro said. Girls who developed breasts early tended to have a higher body-mass index (BMI) than those who didn't. Though much is still unknown about how high BMIs kick start puberty, fat cells produce leptin, a hormone involved in the onset of pubertal maturation, Biro noted.
Biro and his colleagues are also conducting analyses of the girl's blood and urine to determine if environmental exposures to chemicals could be contributing, but those results have yet to be completed.
And even if environmental exposures are found to play a role, the association between excess weight gain and early onset of puberty is very strong, Biro said.
"Girls who go into puberty earlier have a higher BMI than those who go into it later, and studies have shown that they typically persist in having a higher BMI throughout life," Biro said.
If a child is showing early signs of puberty, experts recommend an evaluation by a pediatrician or an endocrinologist to rule out medical problems.
Parents and pediatricians can also help girls maintain a healthy weight through proper nutrition and exercise, Herman-Giddens said.
Even with those steps, some girls will simply be predisposed to developing earlier than others and that's perfectly normal, the experts said. And while early development poses risks for girls, parents can help their girls by talking with them, Herman-Giddens said.
"Whatever they do, parents cannot just ignore it," she said. "Women have told me that their parents completely shut down and did not know how to cope or help them at all. That is very hard on the child. They have to reassure the child they are normal, they are just early."
A second study published in The Lancet, led by Mildred Maisonet of Emory University, Atlanta, examined at the histories of 4,000 British girls aged 8 to 14. Her team found that girls whose mothers had experienced menarche before age 12, who smoked during pregnancy or who were firstborn children were more likely to experience early onset of puberty compared to other girls.
Daughters of obese mothers were also more likely to be overweight themselves, and were more likely to show breast development at an early age, the study found. Birth weight or birth length did not influence the timing of puberty, yet a rapid increase in BMI during infancy was associated with earlier onset of puberty
Bloomberg Businessweek
I'm going to make a suggestion and then ask a question.
The suggestion is that the foods these girls eat are full of hormones meant to fatten animals and to increase their bulk quickly. The hormones flower as early breasts in the little girls.
Bovine hormones to create greater milk yields are probably the worse.
The question is was there any statement about obesity? Fat little girls often seem to have breasts.
@plainoldme,
plainoldme wrote:
I'm going to make a suggestion and then ask a question.
The suggestion is that the foods these girls eat are full of hormones meant to fatten animals and to increase their bulk quickly. The hormones flower as early breasts in the little girls.
Bovine hormones to create greater milk yields are probably the worse.
The question is was there any statement about obesity? Fat little girls often seem to have breasts.
Yes, there's a relation between childhood obesity and breast development in girls at a young age.
While the above may be true, it's interesting to note that not all fat women have large breasts.
@Miller,
No, they do not. In fact, many truly fat women have pads of fat that have no real shape and mostly just slide under their arms, the way that Japanese male wrestlers do. These women probably have insufficient female hormones.
But young girls and even boys will develop breasts if there are growth hormones in their food. I suspect that some of the weight gain in our society is from hormones given to animals.
I agree.
Too many McDonald's meals.
@PUNKEY,
Too many bovine hormones.
I can't help but wonder if these hormones are in any way related to the development of autism.
@Miller,
I would say no. There has been some link to environmental toxins but insufficient data to make a good case. Frankly, I think autism has always been with us. I suspect some "village idiots" were autistic.
@plainoldme,
Isn't there a link between hormonal therapy and development of breast cancer?
@Miller,
Quote:Too many bovine hormones.
we should already know if that is the cause...there are now enough kids who start vegetarian diets early to do a study. I am not sure what the problem with figuring out if obesity is either, all they need to do is correlate onset of puberty with a history of the kids weight. This aint rocket science, I am not sure what the problem is...
Genes and culture both play a role. Why do you suppose there are so many striking differences between the various ethnic groups?
From John Robbins in the Huffington Post:
People are very upset about this, and for good reason. Female infants in China who have been fed formula have been growing breasts.
According to the official Chinese Daily newspaper, medical tests performed on the babies found levels of estrogens circulating in their bloodstreams that are as high as those found in most adult women. These babies are between four and 15 months old. And the evidence is overwhelming that the milk formula they have been fed is responsible.
Synutra, the company that makes the baby formula consumed by these babies, says it's not their fault. They insist that "no man-made hormones or any illegal substances were added during the production of the milk powder."
Then what is the source of the hormones? A Chinese dairy association says the hormones could have entered the food chain when farmers reared the cows. "Since a regulation forbidding the use of hormones to cultivate livestock has yet to be drawn up in China," says Wang Dingmian, the former chairman of the dairy association in the southern province of Guangdo, "it would be lying to say nobody uses it." Bovine growth hormones are used in China, as they are in the U.S., to promote greater milk production.
An extraordinary number of food products sold in the U.S. today come from China. Could some of this tainted formula be making its way to the U.S.?
There is currently no way for consumers to know whether infant formula they might purchase has been made with milk products from China.
If this problem appears in the U.S., who will be held responsible? The retailers? The importers? The Chinese producers? Will anyone be called to account?
As I describe in my books The Food Revolution and Diet For a New America, and on my website, this isn't the first time something like this has happened. In the 1980s, doctors in Puerto Rico began encountering cases of precocious puberty. There were four-year-old girls with fully developed breasts. There were three-year old girls with pubic hair and vaginal bleeding. There were one-year-old girls who had not yet begun to walk but whose breasts were growing. And it wasn't just the females. Young boys were also affected. Many had to have surgery to deal with breasts that had become grossly swollen.
Writing a few years later in the Journal of the Puerto Rico Medical Association, Dr. Carmen A. Saenz explained the cause. "It was clearly observed in 97 percent of the cases that the appearance of abnormal breast tissue was...related to local whole milk in the infants."
The problem was traced, and found to stem from the misuse of hormones in dairy cows. When Dr. Saenz was asked how she could be certain the babies and children were contaminated with hormones from milk rather than from some other source, she replied simply: "When we take our young patients off... fresh milk, their symptoms usually regress."
Along with China, the U.S. is today one of the few countries in the world that still allows bovine growth hormones to be injected into dairy cows. Though banned in Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and most of Europe, the use of these hormones in U.S. dairy is not only legal, it's routine in all 50 states.
The U.S. dairy industry assures us that this is not a problem. But there is a very real problem, and its name is Insulin-like Growth Factor-1 (IGF-1). Monsanto's own studies, as well as those of Eli Lilly & Co., have found a 10-fold increase in IGF-1 levels in the milk of cows who have been injected with bovine growth hormone (BGH).
Why is that a problem? A report by the European Commission's authoritative international 16-member scientific committee not only confirmed that excessive levels of IGF-1 are always found in the milk of cows injected with BGH. It also concluded that excess levels of IGF-1 pose serious risks of breast, colon and prostate cancer.
How serious is the increased risk? According to an article in the May 9, 1998 issue of the medical journal The Lancet, women with even a relatively small increase in blood levels of IGF-1 are up to seven times more likely to develop breast cancer than women with lower levels.
IGF-1 that is consumed by human beings in dairy products is rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream. It isn't destroyed by human digestion. And pasteurization is no help. In fact, the pasteurization process actually increases IGF-1 levels in milk.
What's a consumer to do?
If at all possible, breast-feed your babies, and support breast-feeding friendly workplaces and other environments. It's hard to overstate the health advantages of breast-feeding for both mother and baby. They are enormous, and particularly so today, when the possibility exists that commercially available infant formula could be contaminated with excess hormones.
If you are going to buy dairy products, try to get them from organic sources. Organic milk products by law can't be produced with bovine growth hormone (BGH). Or look for dairy products that specifically say they are produced without BGH (also called recombinant bovine somatotropin, or rBST). Starbucks only uses dairy products that have not been produced with the hormone. Ben & Jerry's ice cream likewise uses only milk and cream from dairy farms that have pledged not to use BGH.
If you're going to eat cheese, remember that American-made cheeses are likely to be contaminated with BGH and excess levels of IGF-1 unless they're organic or labeled BGH-free. Most cheeses that are imported from Europe are safe, though, since much of Europe has banned the hormone.
Have you ever wondered why dairy products made from cows injected with the hormone aren't labeled? It's because Monsanto, the original manufacturer of BGH, has aggressively and successfully lobbied state governments in the past to make sure that no legislation is passed that would require such labeling.
As if that wasn't enough, Monsanto has also insistently sought to make it illegal for dairy products that are BGH-free to say so on their labels, unless the labels also included wording exonerating BGH. How does Monsanto justify such a dangerous condition? They say that allowing retailers to tell consumers that a dairy product is BGH-free shouldn't be allowed, even if it's true, because it unfairly stigmatizes BGH.
Monsanto acts as though accurately labeling products would make them the victim of some irrational cultural bias. But the company's products are, in fact, responsible for untold damage to human health.
My compassion is not for Monsanto. My heart goes out to the babies in China and their families, to the children in Puerto Rico and their families, and to the millions of others who have been or will be adversely affected by the abuse of hormones in dairy production.