A guide to early puberty in girls offers advice for parents on how to address the physical and emotional challenges that might affect daughters, discussing such topics as early puberty controversy, misconceptions, and current clinical findings.

A generation ago, fewer than 5 percent of girls started puberty before the age of 8; today, that percentage has more than doubled. Early puberty is not just a matter of physical transformation—it’s also deeply psychological, with a myriad of effects that can put a girl at higher risk for behavioral problems and long-term health challenges. In this reassuring and empowering guide, Louise Greenspan, MD, and Julianna Deardorff, PhD—two leading experts on the root causes and potential consequences of early puberty in girls—deliver vital advice on how to prevent and manage early puberty. They explain surprising triggers—from excess body fat to hormone-mimicking chemicals to emotional stressors in a girl’s home and family life—and offer highly practical strategies, including how to limit exposure to certain ingredients in personal care and household products, which foods to eat and which to avoid, ways to improve a child’s sleep routine to promote healthy biology, and more. The New Puberty is an engaging, urgently needed road map to helping young girls move forward with confidence, ensuring their future well-being.

Accompanying CD-ROM contains: contents of book; continuous updates; slide image library; references linked to MEDLINE; pediatric guidelines; case studies; review questions.

More children born today will survive to adulthood than at any time in history. It is now time to emphasize health and development in middle childhood and adolescence--developmental phases that are critical to health in adulthood and the next generation. Child and Adolescent Health and Development explores the benefits that accrue from sustained and targeted interventions across the first two decades of life. The volume outlines the investment case for effective, costed, and scalable interventions for low-resource settings, emphasizing the cross-sectoral role of education. This evidence base can guide policy makers in prioritizing actions to promote survival, health, cognition, and physical growth throughout childhood and adolescence.

Written with the busy practice in mind, this book delivers clinically focused, evidence-based gynecology guidance in a quick-reference format. It explores etiology, screening, tests, diagnosis, and treatment for a full range of gynecologic health issues. The coverage includes the full range of gynecologic malignancies, reproductive endocrinology and infertility, infectious diseases, urogynecologic problems, gynecologic concerns in children and adolescents, and surgical interventions including minimally invasive surgical procedures. Information is easy to find and absorb owing to the extensive use of full-color diagrams, algorithms, and illustrations. The new edition has been expanded to include aspects of gynecology important in international and resource-poor settings.

The publication of this volume at this time appears particularly auspi cious. Biological, psychological, and social change is greater during the pubertal years than at any other period since infancy. While the past two decades have witnessed a virtual explosion of productive research on the first years of life, until recently research on adolescence, and particularly on puberty and early adolescence, has lagged substantially behind. This book provides encouraging evidence that things are changing for the better. Considered separately, the individual chapters in this book include important contributions to our growing knowledge of the biological mechanisms involved in pubertal onset and subsequent changes, as well as of the psychological and social aspects of these changes, both as con sequences and determinants. In this regard, the book clearly benefits from the breadth of disciplines represented by the contributors, includ ing developmental endocrinology, adolescent medicine, pediatrics, psy chology, and sociology, among others.