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The age of onset of pubertal development in healthy Thai girls in Khon Kaen, Thailand
International Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology volume 2013, Article number: P77 (2013)
Onset of puberty has shifted toward a younger age in the 21st century. The useful pubertal assessment in the individual child must be based on recent and reliable reference data from the same population. However, currently representative pubertal data for Thai girls are lacking. Therefore, we determine the current prevalence and mean ages at onset of pubertal characteristics in healthy urban Thai girls in Khon Kaen Province, northeast Thailand.
A cross-sectional study was carried out between January and July 2011. Five hundred and three school girls aged 7 to 16 years were enrolled. All were in good physical health. Stages of breast and pubic hair development were rated on girls by Tanner’s criteria. Assessment was performed by a trained pediatrician. Data on menstruation were collected by the status quo method. The median (range) ages of the onset of thelarche and pubarche were 9.3 (7.8-13.4 ) and 10.8 (8.9-14.5 ) years, with the mean± SD of 10.1± 1.2 and 11.6± 1.2 years, respectively. One hundred and eighteen girls had experienced menstruation. The median (range) age of menarche was 11.6 (10.0-14.0) years and the mean age was 11.6± 0.8 years . The mean ages of pubarche and menarche decreased from the previous study significantly (P < 0.001). These data can be used as the reference of normal pubertal development in Thai girls in Khon Kaen for the purpose of determining precocious or delayed puberty.
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Open Access This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
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Jirawutthinan, N., Panamonta, O., Jirawutthinan, S. et al. The age of onset of pubertal development in healthy Thai girls in Khon Kaen, Thailand. Int J Pediatr Endocrinol 2013 (Suppl 1), P77 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1186/1687-9856-2013-S1-P77
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1687-9856-2013-S1-P77