The study led some experts to suggest changes in the guidelines used by pediatricians in deciding whether girls whose puberty starts early need to be evaluated by specialists to look for medical problems that might be the cause. And it has led parents and social scientists to cast about for explanations. They have attributed the change to such things as plastics in the environment or hormones in food or the influence of explicitly sexual television shows on the development of girls' brains. But some pediatric endocrinologists are now trying to stop the bandwagon. The danger, they said, is that if doctors assume that girls who start developing at 6 or 7 are normal, they might miss serious medical problems like tumors or genetic disorders that can cause early puberty.
Early puberty can also decrease a girl's ultimate height.
And some young girls have serious psychological and social difficulties when they start puberty at age 6 or 7. In addition, some pediatric endocrinologists also worry that doctors who dismiss such early development as normal might not tell the girls' parents that there is a safe, though expensive, drug that can temporarily halt their daughters' sexual development. Already, these critics say, some parents with legitimate concerns about their daughters' early development are being brushed off by pediatricians who believe puberty in the first or second grade is normal. I think it is potentially medically dangerous. The problem with the embrace of the early puberty hypothesis, skeptics like Dr. Bachrach say, is that the science underlying it is questionable.