ESPE Abstracts

Introduction: Developed countries have shown, among the 20^th century, a time trend towards a younger age at menarche. Tanner described an anticipation of 3 months every decade. In the last two decades of twenty century we have observed an apparent stabilization of menarche age in most of Western countries.

Objective: analyze average age of menarche in Tuscany girls and compare our results with those in literature to observe the persistence or not of stabilization of this parameter; analyze average age of breast button appearance in the same population and correlate menarche age with height and BMI, in order to look for relationships between these.

Patients & Methods: we've extrapolated data from databases of 11 Family Pediatric Studies in the provinces of Pistoia and Florence. We've collected the parameters of 1121 girls born between 1995 and 2003, with menarche already happened at the time of the study. The data we evaluated are: menarche age; age of B2 appearance; height and weight measured at the time of menarche and of the last visit carried out by the pediatrician. Finally, we compared the data with the previous data of Rigon et al. (2010) and Bona et al. (2002) in the Italian population..

Results: the average age of menarche is 12,07 ± 3,29 years (P<0.0001 vs. the data of Rigon et al) disclosing an anticipation of the menarche age; the mean age of breast button appearance is 10,18 ± 3,39 years (P<0.05 in comparison with those of Bona et al.) showing an anticipation of B2; the mean menarche age in girls with BMI between 3° and 95° percentile corresponds to 12,05 ± 3,19 years, the one of underweight children (BMI <3° percentile) is 12,74 ± 3,51 years, while the one of obese girls (BMI >95° percentile) is 11,46 ± 2,85 years (P<0.005). We observed a statistically significant relationship between SDS BMI and menarche age (P <0.0001). The average adult height calculated in the cohort which has been spent at least 2 years between menarche and last visit corresponds to 161,47 ± 7,81 cm.

Conclusions: our results suggest a restart of the anticipatory trend of menarche age and of appearance of breast in Italian Girls. We also observe a significant relationship between BMI and the age of first period and between the age of menarche and final height. The definitive average height seems to be conform to the one of the Italian female population (162 cm).