OR15-06 Steroids, stress and body mass index interact to accelerate female pubertal development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Disclosure: L.C. Houghton: None. Y. Wei: None. S.A. Wudy: None. M. Hartmann: None. F.Z. Stanczyk: None. J. Knight: None. I. Andrulis: None. A. Bradbury: None. L. Schwartz: None. S. Buys: None. M. Daly: None. E. John: None. W. Chung: None. R. Santella: None. R.D. Romeo: None. M. Terry: None. Background: There are ongoing concerns about declining age of puberty in females and what is driving the decline. We aimed to identify patterns in the hormonal steroid metabolome associated with accelerated pubertal development in girls, and to determine if this association was modified by body mass index (BMI), markers of stress, and breast cancer family history. We hypothesized that higher androgens and glucocorticoids are associated with accelerated pubertal timing, and this acceleration would be further increased in girls with elevated BMI and stress. We further hypothesized that the stress response changes during the pubertal window. Methods: In the LEGACY Girls Study, we measured 36 metabolites of glucocorticoids, androgens, progesterone, and estrogens in two urine specimens collected before (pre, n=327) and during puberty (pubertal, n=115). Parents assessed the age at onset of breast development (thelarche) through the Pubertal Development Scale. Girls aged ≥10 years self-reported age at menarche. Study staff measured participants’ height and weight and administered questionnaires including the Internalizing Composite Scale (a parent proxy of child stress). We estimated hazard ratios (HR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for the association between a doubling in steroid metabolites (μg/mL per mg of creatinine) and age at thelarche, pubarche and menarche using Weibull survival models, testing for interactions with stress BMI z-scores, and family history using cross-product terms. Results: Higher pre-pubertal levels of urinary metabolites of glucocorticoids (HR=1.9, 95% CI 1.5-2.5), androgens (HR=3.9, 95%CI 2.7-5.6) and progesterone (HR=6.7, 95%CI 4.1-10.9) were associated with accelerated thelarche. Higher pre-pubertal (HR=0.2, 95%CI 0.1-0.5) and pubertal (HR=0.4, 95%CI 0.2-0.9) levels of estrogen metabolites were associated with delayed menarche. Higher levels of pubertal androgen (HR=0.3, 95%CI 0.1-0.8) and progesterone (HR=0.2, 95%CI 0.07-0.7) metabolites were associated with longer pubertal tempo. Girls with high glucocorticoid metabolites, BMI (≥15.6 kg/m2) and stress (≥ 46) reached thelarche 7 months earlier than girls with low glucocorticoid metabolites, BMI (<15.6 kg/m2) and stress (<46). There were no interactions with family history. Conclusion: Elevated metabolites of glucocorticoids, androgens and progesterone are associated with accelerated pubertal onset, and BMI and stress modify this association. Previous studies have focused on estrogens, menarche and BMI; our results suggest that androgens and stress impact the timing of thelarche with implications for our understanding of pubertal development. Presentation: Sunday, July 13, 2025
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".