Overweight More Common Among Early-Maturing Girls, Especially Minorities.

2001 APR 19 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- American girls who mature earlier than others also are more likely to be overweight, a new University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study shows.

Early-maturing black girls faced the highest risk of obesity with 57.5% of them being at or above the 85th percentile of U.S. adolescent female body mass index, a measure of relative weight.

Because many health experts believe girls as a group may develop physically sooner than they did in past generations and because of rapidly increasing rates of type 2 diabetes, obesity prevention efforts should target all U.S. girls, especially blacks, researchers said.

A report on the findings appears in the April 2001 issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

"Recent surveys show an alarming trend of increased prevalence rates of overweight in U.S. adolescents, particularly among minorities," wrote authors Drs. Linda S. Adair and Penny Gordon Larsen, associate professor and assistant professor, respectively, of nutrition at the UNC schools of public health and medicine.

"In the 1960s, 21.1% of black females were overweight," the researchers wrote. "By the mid 1990s, the percentage had increased to 30.7%. Data from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey for 1988 through 1991 also showed that 23.4% of Mexican-American female adolescents aged 12 to 17 years were overweight."

Adair and Gordon-Larsen set out to learn whether a clear relationship existed between early maturation and obesity, a link proposed by Harvard biologist Rose Frisch in the early 1970s. They analyzed information from 6,500 Asian-American, Hispanic, black, and white girls who participated in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and divided the girls into three groups depending on the age at which they first menstruated.