Why are there more and more children with precocious puberty nowadays

  Nowadays, with the improvement of material living standard, parents feel that their children are developing earlier than their own generation nowadays. Precocious puberty in children has also become a problem frequently encountered in pediatric clinics. According to foreign reports, the prevalence of precocious puberty is about 2.6% and 1% in China, but the prevalence of precocious puberty in children in large and medium-sized cities is higher than that in rural areas, and the trend is increasing year by year.  So why are there more and more children with precocious puberty? There are many reasons for the increase of precocious puberty: the improvement of family living conditions, the improvement of dietary nutrients, the acceleration of children’s growth and development, and now the average height of children is also higher than one generation, and there is a trend of early sexual development and sexual maturity. Environmental pollution problems, due to detergents, pesticides and plastics manufacturing plants to the environment emissions of harmful substances, the production of a number of environmental hormone pollutants. Some vegetables, fruits, and meat contain estrogen-like substances, and feeding poultry and livestock with feed containing hormone additives or ripening fruits and vegetables with hormones is also an important reason.  Some parents give their children blind supplements, such as ginseng, royal jelly, pollen, chicken embryo, silkworm pupae and some health products contain more estrogen, and soy isoflavones in soy products are also a kind of estrogen. The consumption of these foods can directly cause premature sexual maturity in children. There are also audiovisual stimuli involving sexual content such as television and video discs that can cause precocious puberty in children. It is not uncommon for tumors to cause precocious puberty, and tumors are life-threatening and must be treated. The principle of “early detection, early diagnosis, and early treatment” should be emphasized, and if neglected, the consequences will be serious.  There are also some cases of precocious puberty that cannot be identified, which are medically known as idiopathic precocious puberty and need to be treated. Because of precocious puberty, although they look taller than children of the same age at the time, their bone age progresses quickly and their final height is shorter than that of their peers.