-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: August 8, 2007 12:38:37 AM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: In UK, Puberty Hits in 2nd Grade -- Big Pharma's Rx: Drugs
to Repress Sexuality
[British] girls entering puberty by age 6
By LOIS ROGERS - 7th August 2007
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?
in_article_id=473584&in_page_id=1879
Some girls now enter puberty as early as six - with toxic chemicals
widely held to blame. But are new drugs to hold back the years
really the right answer?:
Puberty is an unsettling stage in anyone's life, but if it happens
at an age when you are still playing with dolls, it can be very
worrying indeed.
That is exactly what happened to Lucia Reed. She was just seven
when her periods started, an event which distanced Lucia from her
classmates and led to unexplained medical examinations which
terrified her.
'I felt completely alone and alienated, with this horrible secret,'
she recalls 12 years later. 'I knew I was different from everyone
else, but I didn't know what was happening.
'My mum had to tell the school, and they tried to make sure no one
found out what was going on. Because of my periods, I was allowed
to use a different loo from the other girls.
Lucia Reed was only seven when she started her period
'Lessons like P.E. and swimming were a complete nightmare. I got
teased because I had to wear a bra. So I used to pretend to have
headaches and colds to get out of any sport.
'I also had to cope with terrible acne, greasy hair and huge mood
swings. But I was much too embarrassed to discuss it with any of my
friends. It wasn't until everyone else caught up with me at
secondary school that I started to feel able to talk about it.
'My friends couldn't believe it when I finally told them - they
said they felt really sorry for me.
'The scariest part was that because I looked older than I was, men
would come on to me as though I was an adult.'
Doctors are increasingly worried about the number of girls - and
boys - being referred to specialists because of this phenomenon of
'precocious' puberty.
The normal age at which puberty starts in both boys and girls has
dropped by about two years since the 19th century, to 14 for boys
and 12 for girls. This is largely due to improved nutrition - onset
of puberty is believed to be triggered by physical size. Another
theory is that the epidemic of obesity is to blame.
But modern social conditions may also be a contributory factor.
Research suggests that children from broken homes experience
earlier puberty. The stress of family breakdown apparently alters
the balance of growth hormones and other chemicals in the body,
speeding up a child's physical development.
Absent fathers may be another cause. American researchers have
found that biological fathers send out chemical signals that
inhibit their daughters' sexual maturity. Girls whose fathers had
left home started their periods earlier.
Early puberty has even been linked to watching too much television.
A few years ago, Italian scientists found that children who watched
three hours a day produced less of the sleep hormone melatonin -
low levels of the hormone play an important role in the timing of
puberty.
But perhaps more worrying is the theory that it's exposure to
environmental chemicals which is causing the drop in the age of
puberty. These chemicals mimic the effect of hormones, disrupting
the normal timing of sexual maturing.
Whatever the cause, growing numbers of children are being deprived
of childhood and are turning, physically, into mini-adults at an
increasingly young age. But without the emotional maturity to deal
with these changes, they are vulnerable to exploitation.
In Britain, it is now estimated that up to [17% of] children under
ten are affected. Indeed, there is a belief that schoolgirls as
young as six are entering puberty.
In order to discover whether puberty really is arriving earlier,
scientists are keeping track of 12,000 teenagers born in a 20-month
period in what was the county of Avon (the group are now aged 14 to
15).
The Children Of The 90s study, as it is known, has already noted
that breast development in the girls was happening at an earlier
age than in previous generations.
Meanwhile, as highlighted in a forthcoming BBC radio programme, a
debate is raging in the medical profession about what should be
done about this trend: should powerful drugs, normally used to
treat cancer, be routinely prescribed to young children to block
the hormonal changes taking place in their bodies; or should the
medically defined normal age range for onset of puberty simply be
adjusted downwards so that the increasing number of children
reaching sexual maturity while still at primary school are no
longer viewed as abnormal?
Not surprisingly, the drugs industry supports the first approach.
In the past four years, drug manufacturers have alighted on this
expanding market for premature puberty treatment. The hormone-
blocking drugs Gonapeptyl and Decapeptyl have been licensed for use
in children, although the manufacturers refuse to say how widely
they are being prescribed.
A spokesman for Ferring, which makes Gonapeptyl, says the drug was
licensed to treat girls who reached puberty before their ninth
birthday and boys who reached puberty before the age of ten, but
claimed it had not been on the market long enough to report what
the take-up had been.
A different approach is being suggested by experts such as the
American Academy of Pediatrics which wants to lower the age of
'normal' puberty to as young as seven.
Puberty involves huge physical, emotional and hormonal changes as
the body prepares for reproduction. There is rapid growth and
weight gain, the appearance of bodily hair and, for many, an
unwelcome crop of acne. Girls develop breasts and begin having
menstrual periods; boys begin to produce sperm and their voices
become lower-pitched.
The generally accepted international standards of normal puberty
for white girls were set by a study of 200 females in a British
orphanage in the 1960s, which established that 12.5 years was the
average age at which periods began. Similar studies of boys
concluded that 14 was the average age of sexual maturity for them.
Over the centuries there has been a steady decline in the onset age
for puberty. In Victorian times, it was about 15 for girls and
older for boys; before that, records from Renaissance choirs show
that youths of 17 and 18 were often still to hit puberty because
their voices had not yet broken.
So far, there is no real agreement among doctors about whether we
are just seeing a continuation of this decline in the average age
at which puberty occurs, or whether it is part of a more worrying
environmental trend towards children growing up too quickly.
However, most agree that if breast and pubic hair development
happen before eight or nine in girls, or signs of puberty manifest
themselves in boys under ten, it is 'abnormal'.
Gary Butler professor of paediatric endocrinology at Reading
University, who is one of Britain's leading experts on the
phenomenon of early puberty, is calling for urgent action to find
out exactly how many children may be affected in order to address
the growing fears of parents and teachers, who are having to deal
with young children suffering the problems of teenagers.
'People are worried about this,' he says. 'There is evidence that
children with precocious sexual development become sexually active
earlier. It is our responsibility as the people best placed to know
about it to come up with some answers.
'It is not just the social issue of having children able to
reproduce at a very young age; we need to answer the question of
whether early adulthood has a knock-on effect which makes them
susceptible to adult health problems such as cancer and heart
disease.'
He is embarking on his own study next January, which will aim to
follow the development for the next five years of up to 1,000 seven-
year-olds in Berkshire.
Their families will be asked to agree to regular weighing and blood
tests to check for biochemical markers of puberty. They will also
be asked to keep records of the children's diet.
Meanwhile, the data from the ongoing Avon study is being analysed
by researchers at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia --
acknowledged world experts on environmental factors which affect
human hormones.
These include a group of industrial chemicals called phthalates,
which are linked to early puberty and have recently been banned
from a vast range of cosmetics and household products.
Sally Watson, the spokesperson for the study, says: 'It is too
early to say if early puberty is really affecting a lot of children
or what might be causing it, but this study will give more
information than any previous investigation because we have tracked
these children since their mothers were pregnant.
'We know what age the mothers started their periods, we know about
their weight and diet, and we will be able to see what is inherited
and what isn't.'
Another question yet to be answered is whether the development of
breasts and other signs of physical maturity mean that menstruation
and full fertility are also starting sooner.
There are increasing reports of very young girls getting pregnant.
Most recent statistics (for 2003) show 148 girls aged 13 or younger
had abortions. However, it could be that although the whole process
is inexplicably starting earlier, it is taking longer to complete,
and that parents are worrying unnecessarily.
Professor Peter Hindmarsh, a specialist at Great Ormond Street
Hospital for Children, says that while there might be a small shift
towards earlier sexual maturity, early breast development is in
parallel with the rising rates of obesity in young girls.
Ieuan Hughes, professor of paediatrics at Cambridge University,
agrees that many young girls who seem to be developing breasts, are
simply fat. 'There is a risk of overdiagnosing it,' he says. 'We
have to do tests to establish hormone levels and bone development.
'Nevertheless, the earliest age for normal puberty is down to eight
in girls and nine in boys. We are not jumping in to give treatment
earlier in this clinic. We tend to ask the parents if they think
their child is mature enough to cope with having periods, but it's
a grey area.'
This debate is of little comfort to the thousands of families
struggling to cope with this unexpected complication of child-rearing.
Now A 19 year-old art student, Lucia Reed lives with her mother,
Miranda, in Ladbroke Grove, West London. Miranda, 55, who works as
a specialist writer, and also has a 24-year- old daughter who did
not experience early puberty, acknowledges that she found the
experience almost as worrying as her daughter did.
'I first noticed she was getting hair under her arms when she was
about six or seven, but I suppose I was in denial about it,' says
Miranda. 'I didn't really talk to her about sex because she seemed
too young, even though she looked a lot older.
'By the time she was ten, men were trying to pick her up. It was a
very worrying time and there was not much advice available.'
Debbie Smith, 41, a GP dispenser, from Nottingham, tells a similar
story. Her daughter. who is now 12, was just eight when she reached
full sexual maturity.
'We felt very alone. We weren't even told drugs to stop puberty
were an option,' says Debbie. 'Although I think she coped with it
all reasonably well, she was very self- conscious in P.E. and
swimming classes. She's now a mini-adult, but I don't let her dress
older than her age and I do keep a close eye on her.'
But neither Miranda nor Debbie would have wanted their daughters to
have taken hormone-blocking drugs. 'What we really need is for
someone to recognise this is a horrible thing for the affected
families,' says Debbie. 'We need more support.'
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