The Falling Age of Puberty in U.S. Girls: What We Know, What We Need to Know

Three Key Findings From the Report

From the Breast Cancer Fund Advocate’s Guide: What We Can Do About the Falling Age of Puberty
Previous section: Possible Contributing Factors to Early Puberty »

Fewer than 10 percent of breast cancers occur in women with a genetic history of the disease. Even when all traditional risk factors—including genetic predisposition, reproductive history, diet, exercise and alcohol—are aggregated, more than half of all breast cancer cases remain unexplained. At the Breast Cancer Fund, we believe that exposures to toxic chemicals in the environment are not only contributing to high breast cancer rates but also to the earlier arrival of puberty in girls. With this in mind, the Breast Cancer Fund is highlighting three key findings that emerged from The Falling Age of Puberty.

1. Our children are not adequately protected from environmental chemical exposures. Recent studies have shown that the amount of natural hormones that a child produces is much less than previous research showed. This changes how we think about the potential impact of a synthetic chemical in a child’s body: even a tiny amount could have a huge impact if, for example, the amount of synthetic chemical is roughly the same as the amount of the naturally occurring hormones. This has implications for the setting of safe levels of chemical exposures for our children. The report describes puberty as a delicate process that is inherently susceptible to disruption. To stop early puberty we need public health protections that protect the most vulnerable—our children—from harmful chemical exposures and err on the side of precaution.

2. Early puberty is hitting some girls harder than others. All of the possible causes of early puberty discussed in the report – obesity, television viewing, physical inactivity, psychosocial stressors, low birth weight, formula feeding and chemical exposures – hit poorer communities and communities of color the hardest. These are communities where poverty, racism, unemployment and exposure to toxic substances are high and access to nourishing food and safe places to exercise is low. As the author has noted, “…early puberty is not only a women's issue (because it disproportionately affects girls) but it is a class and race issue as well.” To address this disparity, we need interventions and responses to early puberty that acknowledge that low-income, overweight girls of color are most at risk.

3. We need to reach beyond our own communities and work together to address the falling age of puberty. We need to work closely with our colleagues in children’s health, women’s health and environmental health and build new collaborations with specialists working on the nutritional, behavioral and psychosocial contributors to early puberty. The author states in the report, “The problem with problems that cross multiple environmental media is that they fall between regulatory and activist cracks. On the one hand, addressing all the root causes simultaneously raises the risk for programmatic and regulatory fragmentation and leads to inertia. On the other hand, addressing one problem at a time does not begin to unknot the tangle of its interrelated causes.”

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Download the full report, The Falling Age of Puberty »