Effects of early menarche on physical and psychosocial health problems in adolescent girls and adult women

Abstract

The menarcheal age of Korean women has been rapidly decreasing for the last 50 years, and the average menarcheal age of women born in the 1990s is approaching 12.6 years. In addition, interest in early puberty has been increasing recently owing to the rapid increase in precocious puberty. Generally, out of concern for short stature and early menarche, idiopathic central precocious puberty in female adolescents is treated with gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogs. Studies to date have described the association between early menarche and psychosocial problems such as delinquency and risky sexual behavior, as well as physical health problems such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and breast cancer throughout the lifespan of women. However, the pathophysiological mechanism underlying this association has not been clarified thus far. In this article, we review and discuss the existing literature to describe the current understanding of the effects of early menarche on the physical and psychosocial health of adolescent girls and adult women.

Keywords: Breast neoplasms; Diabetes mellitus; Menarche; Risk behavior; Sexual behavior.

Fig. 1. Prevalence of diabetes, prediabetes, and dysglycemia according to age at menarche. Adapted from Baek et al. Menopause 2015;22:542-8, with the permission of Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc..

Fig. 2. Relative risk (RR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) of incident coronary heart disease (CHD) according to age at menarche. RRs (hazard ratios) are stratified by region of recruitment and adjusted for year of birth, body mass index, height, smoking, alcohol consumption, exercise, and socioeconomic status. The reference category is menarche at 13 years of age. The area of the square is inversely proportional to the variance of the log risk. ICD-10, International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision. Adapted from Canoy et al. Circulation 2015;131:237-44, with the permission of Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc..

Fig. 3. Relative risk (RR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) of incident cerebrovascular disease (CeVD) according to age at menarche. RRs (hazard ratios) are stratified by region of recruitment and adjusted for year of birth, body mass index, height, smoking, alcohol consumption, exercise, and socioeconomic status. The reference category is menarche at 13 years of age. The area of the square is inversely proportional to the variance of the log risk. ICD-10, International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision. Adapted from Canoy et al. Circulation 2015;131:237-44, with the permission of Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc..