Girls around the country are starting puberty ever younger, says a new study out in Pediatrics. Researchers led by Frank Biro studied more than a thousand girls between six and eight years old from New York, Cincinnati, and San Francisco. Their findings: By the age of 7, about 23 percent of black girls, 15 percent of Hispanic girls, and 11 percent of white girls showed enough breast development to be considered pubescent. Those numbers are even more extreme than the findings of a similar 1997 study that seemed to show the age entering puberty was dropping fast. Says Biro:
"In 1997, people said, 'That can't be right; there must be something wrong with the study'. But the average age is going down even further" [Los Angeles Times].
