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Internationally adopted children reaching puberty earlier
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Internationally adopted children are reaching puberty at young ages and have a high risk for early puberty, including very early or precocious puberty, according to an editorial that was recently published in Pediatrics.
“However, there can be uncertainty over the chronological age of adopted children, raising the possibility that the seemingly elevated risk of early puberty is due to some children having a significantly under-recorded age, perhaps of up to 2 years or more,” Peter Hayes, PhD, of the University of Sunderland in the United Kingdom, said in the editorial.
Hayes said underestimates of age are more likely than overestimates because people are more willing to adopt younger children, and neglected and malnourished children will be smaller and less advanced than typical children the same age.
“Nonetheless, most researchers have tended to discount under-recorded age as a systemic explanation of the elevated risk of early puberty in favor of theories that assume that, in most cases at least, they are dealing with a genuine diagnosis,” Hayes wrote.
According to Hayes, past studies show that the older the recorded age of a child, the higher the risk for early puberty. When adopted, malnourished children whose height has been affected with catch up to their height potential, and early puberty has been associated with those children who catch up the fastest.
Other researchers attribute early puberty to nutritional deprivation before adoption, Hayes wrote. He added that the theory gained some support from a study on male rats, but it did not extend to nonadopted children who recovered from postnatal under-nutrition.
“All of these investigations required transdisciplinary research,” Hayes wrote. “The research to date, however, has been largely driven by the effort to come to a better understanding of the onset of puberty rather than the context of adoption, with a notable absence of curiosity over how either adoption practices or social, cultural and bureaucratic norms in different states of origin may impinge on the reliability of birth dates.”
Disclosure: Hayes reports no relevant financial disclosures.
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