No cite, but I’m sure anyone with marginal google-fu can dig one up. And anyone who has daughters, or who spends any time with children, can tell you anecdotally as well: girls are reaching puberty earlier than they were a generation or two ago.
Has this coincided with any change in the average age of onset of menopause, one way or the other?
My menarche was at the age of 10. It’s been over 30 years, and no sign of menopause yet.
This is a hard question because there’s no consensus on why girls are starting puberty earlier than they used to, so given that it’s hard to correlate earlier puberty to a possible rise in later menopause.
One of the front-runner theories is that puberty starts earlier because girls are fatter than they used to be, and the supposition that your period starts when you reach 100 pounds or so. Anecdotally this makes sense to me: I didn’t weigh 100 pounds until 9th grade, nor did my period start until that year (less than 20 years ago). Yet there are bunches and bunches of girls whose periods started before they were that heavy.
Then there’s the antibiotics in food theory - but between voluntary changes in the industry over the past ten years and the FDA’s constantly evolving positions on antibiotics in chicken, kids are being exposed to less of that too.
Could either of these things effect women’s bodies on the other end too? I don’t know of any studies for either, but they could be out there.
Do recall that the plural of anecdote is not data, and that lots of stuff everyone knows is completely wrong.
That can’t be universally true. I got my first period at 9 and there’s no way I weighed 100lb. When I graduated high school I weighed 110. BTW, my parents were granola-crunchy before their time; we weren’t allowed processed foods, or soda, or most sweets.
ETA: I got my first period in 1984.
Started at age 9. Ended apparently last Christmas, abruptly, at age 50. Since 50 is the exact average age for women in the US, I’m not sure starting early means ending early.
Actually, I just googled it, and although the average age of menarche is getting earlier and earlier, the average age of menopause is remaining steady. Interesting.
eta: Actually, I may be an anomaly, because I don’t think the age of menarche was getting noticeably younger in 1967, when I first had a period.
I didn’t start until I was 14. Of course, pretty much everyone else already had. My niece started when she was 9. I can’t even imagine.
I did read somewhere that you can pretty much gauge when you will enter menopause based on your mother and grandmother. Since both of mine have had hysterectomies, I figure it will be a surprise.
I don’t think I hit 100 lbs until I was about graduating. Odd to think about, since I recently got down to 105 and looked like I was gonna die.
Maybe it isn’t 100lbs but it is a BMI. I know athletes and anorexics have their periods stop. The early onset might be body fat related, rather than any actual specific weight.
Turning 55 next Thursday (Happy Birthday to me) and still having a period every 28-30 days. Unbelievable. Thinking this has to end soon. Started when I was 12 so that’s a whopping 43 years of “female bliss”.
I think part of the phenomenon is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Kids are having sex at an earlier age, and some of the girls who have reached early puberty are having babies. The next generation engages in sex a little earlier, and the girls in this generation are already able to get pregnant. So with every new generation, the average onset of puberty gets a little earlier.
I got my first period in 1998 at 13, and I didn’t hit 100 pounds till graduating high school, or maybe a year or so later. My BMI is now a really low 18, and I guess it would have been below that when I was first menstruating.
Waaaaaaaaait a minute. Did you just postulate a detectable evolutionary effect on menarche age as a result of behavioral changes over a period of a few decades at most?
Because I think that leaves you with some 'splaining to do. Is earlier childbirth for some girls really providing a significant reproductive advantage? Especially considering that large numbers of other women are deferring childbirth to later and later ages, and births to just-pubescent girls aren’t always the healthiest for the mother or child? And why would earlier births to some girls, even if it somehow did turn out to be responding to some kind of selection pressure, end up reducing average menarche age for girls in general? The more I think about this the more I don’t get it.
From the NIH
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I was talking to my gynecologist the other day about my family history, and asked her if there’s a correlation between late puberty in women and late menopause as there’s a history of both on my mom’s side. She said “yes there is”.
I don’t know where you got the idea that early puberty means late menopause. Can you tell us why you think there’s a connection?
I know for an absolute fact that I was the LAST GIRL IN MY CLASS to start.
Anecdotal data (oxymoron?) indicates I was also one of the last in my age group to stop.
At one time I heard that if you started late you would have a tendency to stop earlier. And the reverse. No idea where that theory came from.
Actually multiple anecdotes can in fact be data points. But not scientific data points. As long as anecdotes are factual and not fiction.
shrug I started at 13, in 1989. The week before eighth grade started, actually. I was sorting out school supplies.
Judging from my mom, I have a good twenty or more years of this to go. sigh It’s gonna be a while.
My money goes on fast growth hormones in the food, in particular cows. The beef we eat and the milk we drink. Just my own theory.
I challenge you to provide substantial evidence that the claim of earlier menarche is true. Until then, this discussion is pointless.
It seems to me that the widespread use of contraceptives that interfere with ovulation along with radically shifting patterns of pregnancy/childbirth in the Western world, (not to mention the development of much more specific diagnostic tools to recognize menopause), over the last 50-100 years are as likely to affect the date of menopause as is the early onset of puberty. So even if a strong coorelation was discovered, it would unclear what it meant.
Since we’re trading anecdotes, my mother started her period at 16.
My oldest sister started hers at age 9.
I started at 11 (in 1989).
My twin sister started at 12.
None of us were overweight or underweight.