Puberty Comes Faster to Kids with Low Birth Weight

There is likelihood that your baby, if born small, will reach puberty several months earlier than his or her peers, and that goes for both genders. Development of low-weight children is often characterized by a rapid gain in weight during the next couple of years, and this may cause a faster advance of puberty. Girls will also have their menstruation set in earlier.

That is the gist of a new study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that draws a well-defined correlation between underaverage birth weight (after which children start to pick up weight faster than normal) and an earlier puberty.

The birth weight ranging from 2.5kg to 3kg is believed to cause the onset of puberty earlier by seven months than in those who were heavier at birth. Subsequent rapid increase of weight showed a four-month gap between the puberty age of these kids and kids who showed a normal weight gain speed.
Early puberty was found to be charged with a higher risk of developing breast and testicular cancer due to not a quite normal run of hormonal changes in the child’s body.

Scientists think that these new findings may form the grounds for working out strategies to neutralize a probable threat of cancer growth right from the birth.

Source of the image: sxc.hu/profile/olga_salon.