Puberty is an inevitable part of human maturation, and it increasingly appears to hold a key to understanding individuals’ risk for developing poor health outcomes later in life. Research in girls has established a significant relationship between disease risk and the timing of puberty onset.
Early puberty has been connected to a higher risk for illnesses including endometriosis, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, breast cancer, depression, eating disorders, uterine fibroids, and osteoarthritis, as well as all-cause mortality. Many of these health outcomes exist on a sliding scale where the risk increases as the age of puberty onset decreases. On the other end of the spectrum, late puberty has been associated with celiac disease, asthma, and poor sleep, but it’s also protective against some conditions. Both early and late puberty — before 8 and after 13 years old — are associated with early menopause, which comes with its own health risks.
Progress in this field has also clarified how the relationship between puberty timing and disease development works in women. Early onset, for example, exposes the body to hormones like estrogen for a longer amount of time, raising the risk of conditions like endometriosis and breast cancer. In other cases, puberty timing acts as an early warning system — especially for metabolic and cardiovascular conditions like type 2 diabetes and heart disease — because of shared genetic triggers. The connection between mental health conditions and early puberty onset also has a psychosocial component: Girls whose bodies mature earlier are more likely to feel ostracized and bullied, which can have lifelong consequences.
