(Table 2) * Puberty stage.
Between birth and puberty, the legs grow relatively faster than other parts of the body (Fredriks et al, 2005), and leg length may therefore be a marker of prepubertal growth.
Examples are deviated growth in children needing growth hormone therapy, idiopathic precocious puberty needing GnRH analog therapy, and leg length differences needing growth arrest in the physis or contrary, leg lengthening[ 34].
I was incredibly curious as to what the result would be because I had never had fully grown out leg hair since entering puberty.
If so, then what stage of puberty?
The other downside of puberty was that the hair on my legs thickened.
As spinal growth makes the major contribution to the pubertal growth spurt and limb length the major contribution to childhood growth, treatment with GH will have maximal effect on leg length if instituted before the onset of puberty.
We also did not have information on specific measures of growth (e.g., leg growth, whose growth spurt occurs predominantly before puberty), which precluded us from assessing specific aspects of growth that may have been affected by prenatal exposure to PCBs.
At the age of ten, before I even hit puberty, I was told that a "forest is growing on your legs".
When Cann was Ashlyn's age, she started puberty and was interested in boys, but she remembers being embarrassed about her scars and hiding her legs with long dresses.
Nutritional status before puberty has been hypothesised to be important for development of breast cancer later in life, and some data have suggested that leg length is a more sensitive marker of nutritional influences during prepubertal growth than total height (Wadsworth et al, 2002).
