NEW YORK:  Young girls in the United States are reaching puberty at an earlier age than in the past,   some experts fear that this will have long-term negative effects for young women's mental and physical health. According to study, the average age of puberty in the United States has decreased from the scientifically accepted age of 12 to 10 for females.

Experts believe that the United States' growing obesity epidemic is to blame, causing bad diets for accelerating puberty. Others believe it is linked to an imbalance of particular hormones, while others believe it is caused by violent childhoods.

There are also long-term negative consequences, such as an unexplained link between early puberty and the development of cancer, and the unpleasant experiences generated by a young girl growing up a little too rapidly.

Marcia Herman-Giddens, a public health researcher at the University of North Carolina, first noticed the occurrence in the mid-1990s when she began collecting data on over 17,000 females. She found out that the average age of puberty was decreasing, with some girls maturing as young as six years old. Her results sparked more investigation into the subject, with specialists from many fields looking into what caused the shift and what its long-term implications might be.

The reasons and symptoms of precocious puberty, which occurs when a child reaches puberty too early, are complex and cannot be described with a one-size-fits-all approach.

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