Childhood Obesity Signals Precocious Puberty in Girls

Precocious puberty was defined as the presence of breast development by the age of nine years. The findings are important in the context of increasing rates of childhood obesity in the United States. This study is the first one to examine girls below the age of five years and link overweight to early puberty. Experts say that Early-onset puberty could have an adverse effect because it is associated with increased teenage depression as well as cancer in later life.

Previous studies have documented the fact that girls in the United States are reaching puberty earlier than they were three decades ago. It is no coincidence that childhood obesity rates have also peaked during this time. That is why researchers speculated that early puberty may be linked to childhood obesity.

Joyce Lee of the University of Michigan and colleagues studied 354 girls for determining the link between childhood obesity and early puberty. All girls in the study were aged either normal weight, at risk of being overweight, or overweight. The girls were observed from 3 to 12 years of age.

The girls were classified as having the risk of being overweight if they had a BMI between the 85th and 95th percentiles, and defined as overweight if their BMI was greater than the 95th percentile as compared to standard weight based on age and height.

The study is published in the March issue of the journal Pediatrics.

“Our finding that increased body fatness is associated with the earlier onset of puberty provides additional evidence that growing rates of obesity among children in this country may be contributing to the trend of early maturation in girls,” Lee observed.

Lee, who is a member of the Child Health Evaluation and Research (CHEAR) Unit in the U-M Division of General Pediatrics, said that earlier studies had been unable to determine if weight gain was responsible for early puberty or vice versa, "Our study offers evidence that it is the latter,” Lee added.

The researchers said that by the time they reached fourth grade, around 30 percent of the girls were either at risk for overweight or already overweight. Based on the pre-determined parameters, 168 of the girls were "in puberty" by fourth grade.

Additionally early-onset puberty was associated with large increase in BMI between ages 3 to 9. Weight gain at any point of time from the age of three appeared to contribute to early puberty.

Early-onset puberty is linked to increased rates of stress and reproductive cancer besides encouraging early initiation of alcohol abuse and sexual intercourse. Obese children also grow up to be obese adults. Lee feels that in future studies should look at the exact mechanism that facilitates early puberty in girls having a high level of body fat.

“Beyond identifying how obesity causes early puberty, it’s also important to determine whether weight control interventions at an early age have the potential to slow the progression of puberty,” Lee added.

The decline in the age at which girls attain puberty in the United States was first noted in a landmark study in 1997. The author of that study Marcia Herman-Giddens at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill told New Scientist that the new study is alarming because early onset of female puberty could cause health and social problems.

1. 08-03-2007 01:38

“Precocious” is one of those wildly misinterpreted words that takes on a different societal context even though it grammatically washes. (kind of like ‘morbid obesity’) so I’m going to stay with using ‘early’ puberty since these poor kids have enough to contend with sprouting breast buds from sat fats early on without some jumping to conclusions that this early puberty is behavioral maturation as well!

That said, thanks for this study, it mirrors what we’ve seen played out on the elementary schoolyards in terms of the socioemotional impact on heavier kids. One of our snippets from our film project, “Body Blitz: Media, Shaping Youth” captures a child’s comment about a very large-chested 4th grader, “Ok, THAT is WAY scary-freaky!”

Often these kids are ostracized simply by appearance-based cues and fears of growing up too soon as media and marketing hurls kids into puberty and adulthood FAR too fast.

How many studies do we need to prove the physical and emotional damage our society’s taking on children, from unhealthy fatty food products to early retail sexualization?

The accountability is nil from the media and marketing machine…yet there’s a direct role of irresponsibly mining these kids for profit!

We just wrote about the new APA study on early sexualization in our ShapingYouth.org blog, and we’re constantly counter-marketing the nutritional issues in our “childhood obesity” category.

We have a loooooooooong way to go, with early puberty putting ‘high risk’ groups at an even higher risk of social and health problems.

As the old adage goes, “"I must do something" always solves more problems than "Something must be done.” Let’s do it.

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