© 2002 Archives of Disease in Childhood
LEADING ARTICLE
Puberty
Splitting hairs
Middlesex Hospital, Mortimer Street, London W1T 3AA, UK;
Correspondence to:
R.Viner@ich.ucl.ac.uk
Is puberty getting earlier in girls?
Keywords: puberty; girl
There has been great recent media interest internationally in claims that puberty is occurring at younger ages, particularly in girls. Pundits extrapolate the plunging graphs of the secular trend in menarche downwards into infancy, postulate epidemics of child sexual experimentation, and bewail the loss of innocence of childhood.
Until recently, most of this debate centred on evidence from the United States, particularly the conclusions of a large national study of puberty in girls published in 1997 by Herman-Giddens and colleagues.1 The evidence was sufficient for the US Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society to recently revise downwards its suggested age for investigation of precocious puberty in girls,2 although this has been contentious.3 Suggestions that puberty was occurring earlier received strong support from lay opinion in the UK, particularly from parents and teachers.4 Further energy was given to the debate by the release of unpublished observations from the Avon Longitudinal Study
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