Pubertal Development: Correspondence between hormonal and physical development
By Elizabeth A. Shirtcliff, Ronald E. Dahl, Seth D. Pollak. Child Development, 2009
599 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Puberty marks the advent of adolescence and plays an important role in many changes and adjustments that adolescents must face. Pubertal maturation is advanced by sex hormones, yet it is not clear how best to measure puberty and how well existing measures capture hormone levels. We compared multiple indices of puberty to determine their interrelationships, including the Pubertal Development Scale (PDS), a picture-based interview about puberty (PBIP) and a physical exam. We also examined how physical pubertal measures were associated with basal hormones responsible for advancing pubertal development. Participants included 160 early adolescents (82 boys, 78 girls), 9-14 years of age. Basal hormones were derived using hierarchical linear modeling from 32 repeated saliva samples of testosterone and dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) in both sexes and 5 repeated measures of estradiol in girls. The two self-report measures were moderately concordant with the exam and with each other, with approximately half of the adolescents self-reporting the same stage as the physical exam. The different indices of puberty were highly correlated with each other, suggesting that self-report may be adequate when precise agreement is not necessary. Nevertheless, adolescents who were substantially more or less physically developed than their same-aged peers were most likely to self-report a stage that was different from the physical exam. The physical exam stages correlated well with boys' and girls' testosterone and DHEA, and less so with girls' estradiol. With a few exceptions, the PDS and PBIP were generally related to basal hormones in parallel with the exam. Multiple measures of pubertal development are viable options, each with respective strengths.
Subfields: Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism, Reproductive Medicine
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d06d842d36dead2979b4d3f1e7d1e89955f5b8f3
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Reproductive Medicine
Citations in the corpus
- The influence of puberty on subcortical brain development (2014, unknown): “An individual's puberty stage is related both to how long they have been exposed to the sex steroid hormones, and to their current level of hormones (Dorn and Biro, 2011; Shirtcliff et al., 2009).”
- The Role of Puberty in the Developing Adolescent Brain (2010, background): “The third hormonal event that occurs during puberty is activation of the growth axis, resulting in a linear growth spurt at around age 12 in girls and age 14 in boys, as well as changes in body size and composition [Marshall and Tanner, 1969, 1970].”