The phenomenon is more prominent in black and brown woman, which the researchers literally theorized may be due to ‘racism’.
A study published Wednesday reports that girls are experiencing their first period earlier in life, and that their menstrual cycles are becoming more and more irregular, particularly in black and brown girls, which the researchers posited may be caused by ‘racism’.
“This cohort study of 71,341 US female individuals born between 1950 and 2005 found significant trends toward earlier menarche and longer time to regularity over time,” the study said in the ‘Findings’ section.
The researchers said that accelerating the onset of menarche can lead to adverse health outcomes.
“These findings suggest that early-life menstrual characteristics have been trending in directions that indicate higher risk of later adverse health outcomes, which may contribute to health disparities,” the study said in the ‘Meanings’ section.
The study went more in depth detailing the phenomenon.
“Early menarche is associated with increased risk of adverse health outcomes, such as cardiovascular diseases, cancers, spontaneous abortion, and premature death,3–9 whereas late menarche is associated with increased risk of fractures.10,11 Studies have found trends toward earlier menarche during the past 5 to 10 decades in the US as well as globally12–19,” the study said in the ‘Introduction’ section.
Early onset puberty was observed to be more severe in black and brown females than in white females.
“We found that non-Hispanic Black participants had consistently earlier mean age at menarche than White participants, also similar to prior US-based studies.13,20–26 We also found that non-Hispanic Black participants had a larger magnitude of change toward earlier menarche across birth year categories compared with non-Hispanic White participants. Similarly, we found other groups (Asian and other or multiple races), rarely evaluated in previous studies of menarche, also had consistently earlier mean ages and larger magnitudes of change toward earlier menarche than non-Hispanic White participants,” the study said in the ‘Discussion’ section.
Perhaps shockingly, the researchers hypothesized that black girls may be entering puberty earlier due to racism.
“The factors driving this widening gap of disparities remain to be explored; transethnic genome-wide association studies indicated that these disparities are unlikely to be attributed to genetic variations, suggesting they may be driven by other environmental or contextual factors that may, through racism, impact different pathways, leading to earlier menarche60,” the study said in the ‘Discussion’ section.
While many factors can alter the time to menstruation, such as soy, plastics and cow hormones, they’re not the only causes for discrepancies of first menstruation.
The Covid vaccines, which have been administered since 2021, have been proven to cause reproductive destruction, although their effects are likely not at play with the overall reduction of age at which women enter puberty at despite them causing problems relating to menstruation.
