It is perplexing for girls, their parents and their doctors. The rise in precocious puberty, meaning girls are developing sooner than expected, sooner than in previous years.
“The average age of breast development has been shortened by as much as 1½ years. That is estimated to be more than 10-15% than twenty years ago. And it’s alarming,” says Dr. Cayce Jehaimi. He is a pediatric endocrinologist with Golisano Children’s Hospital. “These percentages are significant.”
Consider these figures:
In the past [age] 8 was the cutoff for the initial onset of puberty- often referring to breast development. A few decades ago less than 5% of girls showed breast growth at age 8- compared to today when at age 7 15% of girls have breast growth. And 27% of eight year old girls have breast development.
“This is something that needs to be addressed and explained to the child.”
Pediatric endocrinologists can take the pulse of puberty, meaning evaluate its level of growth, hormones and expected acceleration. Based on the puberty tempo, doctors may suggest medications to slow it down, or simply monitor development.
“One thing that I would emphasize to the parents and to the child particularly is that you’re normal. They don’t have an actual disease. Yes, puberty has started early but it doesn’t mean that it’s going to follow a unique, different pattern. So it is very important to tell the child that she is normal.”
As to the big question of why girls are growing up so soon, multiple studies point to hormone-mimicking chemicals found in our food and environment.
“We call the chemicals that disrupt the endocrine system EDC, endocrine-disrupting chemicals and we know that there’s a lot of chemicals out there mostly artificially or derived from synthetic oil that have been shown to affect development,” says Dr. Jehaimi.
So the new age of puberty- while it may not merit panic- it does deserve a closer look.
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