Increasing levels of obesity among girls can start puberty even at the age of seven, show latest studies. The additional fat tissue in young bodies, encourage them to produce hormones that initiate sexual transformations. The team of researchers from US found that one in ten girls aged seven had grown breast tissue which is one first signs of puberty.
The early exposure to estrogen has grave health insinuations because it puts them at more risk of developing breast cancer and heart disease, forewarn researchers. It is also believed that environmental chemical that imitates the effects of estrogen can accelerate the clock of puberty.
The study published in the journal Pediatrics presented evidence of trend that has seen the age of puberty thrust spectacularly over the past two hundred years. From 1950 the age of puberty had fallen from fifteen years to eleven years.
In a study researchers from the Cincinnati College of Medicine and Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco studied more than 1240 young girls. It was found that nearly one fifth of white girls aged eight had reached puberty compared with a third of Hispanics and nearly half of black girls.
They need to understand better all the factors that are causative to earlier maturation, said lead researcher Frank Biro, director of adolescent medicine at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Centre. There are no statistics existing for the numbers of seven and eight-year-old girls starting puberty.
Previous Danish study exposed that girls were starting puberty roughly a year earlier than they would have done two decades ago. Earlier growth could escort to increased sexual activity among youngsters, warned researchers, from the University Hospital in Copenhagen