Scientists Link Rare Gene Mutations to Heightened Risk of Autism

Three teams of scientists working independently to understand the biology of autism have for the first time homed in on several gene mutations that they agree sharply increase the chances that a child will develop the disorder, and have found further evidence that the risk increases with the age of the parents, particularly the father.

The gene mutations are extremely rare and together account for a tiny fraction of autism cases, suggesting that the search for therapies will be a long one, and that what is loosely known as autism may represent a broad category of related but biologically distinct conditions.

There are likely hundreds, perhaps thousands, of rare mutations that could disrupt brain development enough to result in social and developmental delays.

But experts said that the overlapping results, reported in three papers posted online Wednesday in the journal Nature, give scientists working on the genetics of autism something they have not had: a clear strategy for building a real understanding of the disease’s biological basis.

Researchers hope to find more similar, rare mutations in the next year or so that they estimate could account for 10 percent to 20 percent of all cases.

Biologists have been groping in vain for a reliable, verifiable foothold from which to investigate the underlying genetics of so-called autism spectrum disorders, including Asperger syndrome and related social difficulties that are being diagnosed at alarmingly high rates — on average, in one of 88 children, according to a government estimate released last week.

Previous studies have produced a scattering of gene findings but little consensus or confidence in how to proceed.

The new work provides a measure of both, as well as strong backing for earlier studies linking autism to the age of new fathers.

“These studies aren’t so much a breakthrough, because we knew this was coming,” said Jonathan Sebat, a geneticist at the University of California, San Diego, who was not a part of the research teams.

“But I’d say it’s a turning point. We now have a reliable way forward, and I think it’s fair to expect that we will find 20, 30, maybe more such mutations in the next year.”

Other researchers were more cautious, saying that the genetics of rare mutations was not yet well enough understood to make conclusive statements about their effect on the behavior of specific genes.

“This is a great beginning, and I’m impressed with the work, but we don’t know the cause of these rare mutations, or even their levels in the general population,” said Dr. Aravinda Chakravarti, of the Institute of Genetic Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School, who was not involved in the studies.

“I’m not saying it’s not worth it to follow up these findings, but I am saying it’s going to be a hard slog.”

The three research teams took a similar approach, analyzing genetic material taken from blood samples of families in which parents who have no signs of autism give birth to a child who develops the disorder.

This approach gives scientists the opportunity to spot the initial mutations that accompany the condition, rather than trying to work though possible genetic contributions from maternal and paternal lines.

In all three studies, the researchers focused on rare genetic glitches called de novo mutations.

De novo mutations are not inherited but occur spontaneously near or during conception. Most people have at least one and the overwhelming majority of them are harmless.

Read more here: Scientists Link Rare Gene Mutations to Heightened Risk of Autism - NYTimes.com

Dyslexia and Processing Deficit: A Dangerous Combination for a Pre-Teen

I saw a 10-year-old 4th grade boy and his parents in my office, already diagnosed with dyslexia and auditory processing deficit of greater than 50 percent.

He had a series of severe ear infections as a baby and toddler and learned to speak much later than the parents’ other two kids.

He was reading at a second grade level and his grades were C-D, even with hours of help from his parents with his homework.

His parents had spent thousands of dollars paying for reading tutors out of school and during the summer break.

The public school had already had him in Wilson Reading tutoring twice per week. He also had speech therapy once per week to tackle his auditory processing defect.

The reading specialist had so many meetings in the school, that she had to cancel the intensive reading tutoring multiple times. His teacher said he was not improving in his reading skills.

This happens quite often.

The public school reading specialist, often has multiple meetings, and with the budget cutback, often he or she is required to cover multiple schools.

This ends up with the Wilson reading tutor actually spending less time than allotted with the child. This boy often comes home from school and when his parents ask him what they covered in history today, he has no idea of even what century or what country was being studied because he has a severe auditory processing deficit.

I explained to his parents that their son has a double barreled problem with both dyslexia and auditory processing deficit, and that these often come together in the same child.

The Wilson method of reading is fine, but this boy needs daily intensive help before he gets any older. This type of drip-drip method of helping him will not work.

He will get frustrated with school, and will put less and less effort into it. He needs daily intensive schooling that is like basic training, where all efforts from adults are directed toward fixing his problems before they become worse.

His parents need to become assertive advocates of their boy, or they will find their boy becomes a very frustrated, angry teenager if he feels like a failure.

Michael Kaufman and Madeleine Kitaj: Attorney and Physician

BishopBlog: Phonics screening: sense and sensibility

There’s been a lot written about the new phonics test that is being introduced in UK schools in June. 

Michael Rosen cogently put the arguments against it on his blog this morning. 

A major concern is that the test involves asking children to read a list of items, and takes no account of whether they understand them. Indeed, the list includes nonwords (i.e. pronounceable letter strings, such as "doop" or "barg") as well as meaningful words. 

So children will be “barking at print” - a very different skill from reading for meaning.

I can absolutely see where Rosen is coming from, but he’s missing a key point. You can’t read for meaning if you can’t decode the words. 

It’s possible to learn some words by rote, even if you don’t know how letters and sounds go together, but in order to have a strategy for decoding novel words, you need the phonics skills. 

Sure, English is an irritatingly irregular language, so phonics doesn’t always give you the right answer, but without phonics, you have no strategy for approaching an unfamiliar word. 

Read more of this article here: Phonics screening: sense and sensibility

Philip Schultz Reads from My Dyslexia - YouTube

The 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and author of My Dyslexia, Philip Schultz, reads from his book at the National Center for Learning Disabilities "Celebrating Our Schools" Luncheon. Visit www.ncld.org for more insightful learning disabilities information.

Autism: Researchers Continue to hunt for causes

For many families, the quest for the causes of autism has grown more urgent with the news that the estimated prevalence of autism grew by 23% from 2006 to 2008, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report out last week.

In most cases, however, scientists can't tell parents what caused their child's autism, says Thomas Insel, director of the National Institutes of Mental Health. In large part, the causes of autism — which is likely not one disease, but a group of conditions with related symptoms — remain a mystery.

For years, scientists had only a few clues about the condition, noticing that autism is about four times as common in boys as in girls, for example.

Recently, scientists have found a number of risk factors for autism, many of which point toward problems that develop very early in life, such as during pregnancy or delivery, or even during the process of creating eggs and sperm, says Craig Newschaffer, a professor at Philadelphia's Drexel University.

To better understand causes of autism, researchers at four major universities are following 1,200 mothers of autistic children through a project called the EARLI study, or the Early Autism Risk Longitudinal Investigation.

Because researchers know that these moms are at high risk of having a second autistic child, they closely follow the women's subsequent pregnancies, testing blood, urine, hair, even vacuuming dust from the women's homes, says Newschaffer, one of the study's lead researchers.

Researchers ask pregnant women to keep lists of any illnesses, since infections during pregnancy are suspected of playing a role in autism.

Doctors can confidently reassure parents that one thing doesn't cause autism — vaccines, says Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Nearly two dozen studies have failed to find a link between autism and vaccines, whether given alone or in combination.

Researchers have clues to other causes:

Genes. About 15% to 20% of autistic children have a genetic mutation that causes their disorder, Insel says. Certain genetic disorders, such as Fragile X syndrome and Rett syndrome, are well-known for increasing the risk of autism.

Even when genes are the main contributor to autism, however, it's possible that most children have a unique mutation or set of mutations, says David Amaral, research director of the University of California-Davis MIND Institute.

Family history. If parents have one child with autism, the risk of having a second child diagnosed with the disorder is nearly 20%, according to a landmark study from U.C.-Davis. Among those with two autistic children, the risk of having a third is 32%, study author Sally Ozonoff says.

Environmental pollution. One California study published last year found that babies whose mothers lived near a highway while pregnant were more likely to be diagnosed as autistic.

Older parents. Both older father and mothers are at higher risk of having autistic children, Newschaffer says. Research from Israel and the Harvard School of Public Health also suggests that infertility treatments, which are more often used among older patients, are linked to a higher risk of autism.

Prematurity and low birthweight. An October study in Pediatrics found that, among babies born weighing less than about 4½ pounds, 5% had been diagnosed as autistic by age 21.

Medications. Many studies now show that a seizure treatment called valproic acid can increase the risk of autism in children exposed before birth. A single study published last year found a higher risk among children exposed prenatally to antidepressants. Using prenatal vitamins is also linked to a lower risk of autism.

Closely spaced pregnancies. In a 2011 study, children who were born less than one year after an older sibling were three times as likely to be diagnosed with autism, compared with children born three years after their mom's last pregnancy.

Medication is not a way for ADHD kids to cheat

We are students living with learning disabilities and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. We disagree with the "Abuse of ADHD drugs creates uneven playing field" (Open Forum, March 16), which compared ADHD medication with performance-enhancing steroids in sports and asked: "Is ADHD (medication) use cheating as well?"

While the author rightly criticizes student use of any stimulant or ADHD drug by those who are not diagnosed with ADHD to enhance their performance, and points out that the drugs don't work unless one has ADHD, she suggests that drug use even by those diagnosed with ADHD somehow gives an unfair advantage.

Wrong.

Accommodations and allowing the use of medication are legally required for students with disabilities. Accommodations are like supplying ramps for wheelchairs, assistive listening devices for the hearing-impaired, glasses for those who need them, or software that reads text aloud for the blind and dyslexic.

Accommodations give students with learning disabilities and ADHD an equal opportunity to succeed in an educational environment that caters to a narrowly defined learning style. They level the playing field. They keep us in school.

Medication is no "enhancer" for us. As one of our students with ADHD put it, those who do not have ADHD "only see the drug as a drug, and nothing else.

They don't see the fight that rages on inside me, my constant struggle to focus, my inability to stay organized, and my tireless efforts to complete tasks others would view as easy." For those with ADHD, medication is a tool, not a solution.

Attending school as a student with learning disabilities or ADHD is hard enough. Fighting the stigma is even harder.

Many students, fearful of the stigma, don't seek help, don't want to be identified and are fearful of being different.

Without good support, without the right accommodations (sometimes including medication), without understanding how we learn or discovering our strengths, we fail, we drop out, and society loses out on valuable contributors.

We now know that a disproportionate number of our most successful CEOs and entrepreneurs have dyslexia or ADHD. They think outside the box; standardized education and high-stakes testing does not hinder their brilliance.

So, please: Learning disabilities, including ADHD, are real. It's really hard to be a student with learning disabilities and ADHD. It's harder yet when people talk about us, not with us.

Autism: France's treatment 'shame' - The Mother's at Fault!

In many countries, the standard way of treating autistic children is with behavioural therapy, stimulating and rewarding them to develop the skills they need to function in society, but France still puts its faith in psychoanalysis, and an increasing number of parents are now demanding change.

For autism campaigners, it is one of the most serious health scandals of our times.

How for decades France turned its back on the latest scientific thinking, and treated autism as a form of psychosis.

How, as a result, tens of thousands of children were misdiagnosed, or worse, not diagnosed at all, and consigned to lives of misery.

And how, to this day, in its approach to autism, the French medical establishment continues to believe in the powers of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, long after the rest of the world has switched to alternative methods of treatment.

"It is an out-and-out disgrace," according to Daniel Fasquelle, a member of parliament who campaigns on the issue.

"Every day I am contacted by parents with the same story, how their child's autism was not detected in time, so they never had the treatment that they needed.

"Thousands of children could have been saved. They do it everywhere else. Why not here? It is France's shame."

The row over autism in France has festered unreported for years but recently it has become public.

Independent associations have been created, lobbying for a move away from psychoanalysis and psychiatry, and over to the "behaviourist" treatments that prevail elsewhere.

In early March, these groups scored an important victory - with a ruling from the health ministry that calls into question the use of psychoanalysis as a treatment for autism.

But the psychoanalysts are not taking it lying down. From their point of view, behaviourism is a form of superficial social conditioning that does not address root causes and they resent the way they have been typecast as the villains of the piece, when their aims are as sincere as those of their opponents.

"One thing that never pays in the field of autism is triumphalism," said Lauriane Brunessaux, a child psychiatrist. "Autism is far too complex, and we understand it so badly.

"Today it is the behaviourists who are being triumphalist."

The behaviourist approach to autism was developed in the 1970s and 80s in the US and Canada, and it is now the norm in most of the world.

Under the so-called ABA method (Applied Behavioural Analysis), autism is treated as primarily an educational, rather than a medical, problem.

With a set of rewards (which can be granted or withheld) and with plenty of individual attention, children can learn to function in society, and be much less of a burden on their families.

"If you diagnose early, and then give the right treatment between the ages of two and seven, 70% of autistic children can acquire functional language skills. Here in France, we are way off that figure," says Fasquelle.

"And the same pattern continues later in life. In the UK, there are 17 times more university students with autism than in France. It is unacceptable."

Fasquelle and autism associations argue that the blame lies with a medical establishment that remains fixated with Freud.

"Today everyone knows that autism is a neuro-developmental problem. It is not a psychosis or mental disorder," says Muhamed Sajidi, president of the association Conquer Autism.

"But in France it is the psychiatrists, heavily influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, who remain in charge and they have shut themselves off from all the changes in our knowledge of autism."

Sajidi set up the association after his life was "destroyed", as he puts it, by the medical establishment's failure to diagnose his son Sami's autism.

For him, as for many others, one of the worst aspects is how blame for autism has been laid at the door of the child's parents, and more especially of the mother.

"The first time I went to see a doctor when my (autistic) son Gael was three and we thought there was a problem, the psychiatrist asked me if I had wanted him - if it had been a wanted pregnancy!" says Candy Lepenuizic, a British woman married to a Frenchman.

"Then she asked what sort of dreams I had had while I was pregnant with him. And suggested the whole family have a course of psychotherapy.

"At that point I got up and walked out. It was only because I had been warned this might happen that I did not burst into tears."

Such horror stories are typical in French families of autistic children.

"The whole idea was that it was la faute à maman (the mother's fault). It was the 'refrigerator mum', or there was some problem with the family dynamic," says Lepenuizic.

"They thought that if the child was failing to communicate with the outside world, it was because of some trauma in the womb or in very early life. There was a family malfunction, and we had to cure it!"

Critics say this emphasis on psychoanalysis and relationships meant that autistic children were not spotted till far too late. And that, in turn, meant that their chances of effective treatment were sharply reduced.

Some 60% of autistic children in Sweden attend school, Sajidi says.

"Today only 20% of autistic children in France are in school, and often only part-time. The rest are either in psychiatric hospitals, or in medico-social centres, or living at home - or in Belgium," says Sajidi.

"Many families are sending their children to Belgium, where it is much easier to set up behaviourist treatment centres.

"Things are changing now, because parents are refusing to be taken for a ride by the professionals. But the real tragedy is with France's autistic adults, many of whom are in a state of total incomprehension or even self-mutilation.

"Seventy-five percent of families with autistic children end in divorce, and normally it is with the mother that the autistic person stays.

"Today these poor elderly women are looking after their adult children with no knowing what will happen when they die."

If Sajidi and other campaigners are beginning to feel the wind turn, it is because the health ministry is finally beginning to fund pilot schemes for behaviourist schools, as well as early diagnosis centres.

In its recent report, the ministry also effectively outlawed a practice known as "packing" where autistic children are wrapped in damp cloths in order to reconnect with their bodies. Campaigners say the treatment is both barbaric and ineffective.

The fundamental problem, campaigners argue, is that the psychiatric profession is resisting calls for change, because the fewer patients there are, the less they earn.

"They have a financial interest in institutionalising autistic children," says Sajidi.

Lepenezuic says: "The state pays. The child doesn't get any better - but who cares? It's being looked after by the state, and the doctors are making a lot of money. Why would they change the system?"

But on the other side of the fence, such charges are deeply resented.

Child psychiatrists like Lauriane Brunessaux believe that the associations have grossly distorted the debate, and are engaged in a battle to "discredit psychoanalysis and the whole notion of the unconscious".

Defenders of the French system argue that the situation was never as one-dimensional as the behaviourists have claimed.

First of all, they say, there have been plenty of success stories emanating from a psychoanalytical treatment of autism. They just have not been so loudly trumpeted.

Secondly, it is not as if the behaviourist approach is itself beyond criticism. In the US and Canada, argues Brunessaux, there have been studies that raise serious questions over its true scientific validity.

"The only real scientific reference for behaviourism is the electric shock experimentation on rats carried out by (US psychologist) Burrhus Skinner in the 1940s.

"Obviously the methods of reward and punishment today are totally different. But that is the background to behaviourism," she says.

For leading French psychoanalyst Eric Laurent, there is a deeper problem.

"Changing behaviour is one thing. But what do you do with the trouble that lies behind it? It is all very well to focus on the skills that can be transmitted via an intensive behaviourist approach, but that leaves a whole dimension out of the picture," he says.

As for the charge that psychoanalysts are responsible for family breakdown, Laurent is equally dismissive.

"The idea that you had to wait for psychoanalysts to come along for there to be hatred inside families is ridiculous. Hatred has always been there.

"Psychoanalysis is being used as a scapegoat - though we should not perhaps mind that, as being a scapegoat is part of the role of psychoanalysis," he says.

What angers people like Brunessaux and Laurent is that while on their side of the debate they are quite prepared to admit the effectiveness of behaviourism - as one of several possible approaches to autism - the behaviourists are dogmatically tied to their system and theirs alone.

Whoever is ultimately in the right, what the autism row perhaps shows most clearly is the changing nature of French society.

Once, families did what they were told. The state was ultimately benevolent, and had massive resources to dispense. If doctors chose institutionalisation, then who was to argue?

Today it is different. Thanks to the spread of knowledge, the internet, consumerism and the decline of the collective spirit - families for the first time feel emboldened to think, and act, for themselves.

Sleep: Accentuating the positive memories

Sleep plays a powerful role in preserving our memories, but while recent research shows that wakefulness may cloud memories of negative or traumatic events, a new study has found that wakefulness also degrades positive memories.

Sleep, it seems, protects positive memories just as it does negative ones, and that has important implications for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

“The study of how sleep helps us remember and process emotional information is still young,” says Alexis Chambers of the University of Notre Dame.

Past work has focused on the role of negative memories for sleep, in particular how insomnia is a healthy biological response for people to reduce negative memories and emotions associated with a traumatic event.

Two new studies presented this week at a meeting of cognitive neuroscientists in Chicago are exploring the flip side: how sleep treats the positive.

“Only if we investigate all the possibilities within this field will we ever fully understand the processes underlying our sleep, memory, and emotions,” Chambers says.

Protecting the positive

To test how sleep affects positive memories, Rebecca Spencer of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and her colleagues split 70 young adults into two groups, one that got to sleep overnight and one that had to stay awake.

Both groups viewed images of positive items, such as puppies and flowers, and neutral items, such as furniture or dinner plates.

The researchers then tested the participants’ memories of and emotional reactions to the images 12 hours later, after either the period of sleep or wake.

They found that “sleep enhances our emotionally positive memories while these memories decay over wake,” Spencer says.

“Positive memories may even be prioritized for processing during sleep.” But while people remembered the positive images more than the neutral ones, their emotional response to the positive images did not change over sleep versus wake.

“It doesn’t matter if you went to sleep or stayed awake, what you thought was a ’9′ i.e. really great, you still think is a ’9′,” she says.

The results, she says, could have significant implications for treating post-traumatic stress disorder, as using wakefulness could have the unintended effect of degrading of positive memories in addition to negative memories.

“It suggests that insomnia should be treated at some point after a traumatic event – perhaps a few days/weeks depending on the level of trauma, so that these positive memories can be strengthened and eventually outweigh the negative,” Spencer says.

Read more: Accentuating the positive memories for sleep | ScienceBlog.com

Autism: Why Some Children ‘Bloom’ and Overcome Their Disabilities

A new study offers some good news for families with autism. Most children affected by the disorder do not have intellectual disabilities, the study finds, and even among the severely low-functioning, about 10% may improve dramatically over time, with some growing out of their diagnosis by their teens.

The study tracked nearly 7,000 autistic children born in California between 1992 and 2001. The group included most of the children who received an autism diagnosis in the state during that time period.

The kids were followed from diagnosis to age 14 or the oldest age they had reached by the time the data collection was concluded.

The researchers found that 63% of the children did not have intellectual disabilities. Although autism is known to cause cognitive deficits in some children, it is also associated with certain enhanced intellectual abilities, and some affected children have extremely high IQs.

About one-third of the study group were considered low- to low/medium-functioning in terms of communication and social skills, meaning that they may have trouble talking, interacting with others or socializing and making friends with peers.

High-functioning kids with autism, meanwhile, can communicate effectively with others, maintain friendships and are willing to engage in social pursuits.

While the highest-functioning children tended to show the most improvement over time in the California study, about 10% of those who started out in the low-functioning group also moved into the highest group by age 14.

“The critical finding is that when you look at those children that this study refers to as ‘bloomers’, the children who seemed very low-functioning at the beginning and then did extremely well, they [tend not to] have any intellectual disabilities,” says Rahil Briggs, assistant professor of pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, she was not associated with the research.

Low-functioning children without intellectual disabilities were twice as likely to “bloom” as those who had cognitive deficits.

Briggs adds that another “very key” factor is that the mothers of the kids who bloomed tended to be more educated and not minorities.

This suggests that low-income immigrant or minority families may not be receiving the services and support for their children that educated, affluent parents are able to access more easily.

With developmental disorders, the earlier a child receives help, the more likely he or she is to overcome disabilities.

Early intervention matters because the brain is remarkably vulnerable early in life, built to shape itself to the environment it initially faces. “The young brain is disproportionately receptive to input, whether positive or negative,” says Briggs.

“That’s why young children can learn a second language easily and why early exposure to domestic violence and toxic stress are so incredibly damaging.”

If autistic children receive intervention before such coping mechanisms as repetitive behaviours and extreme social withdrawal are firmly entrenched, for example, their innate oversensitivity to their environment is far less likely to become or remain disabling, and their other abilities and gifts can flourish.

If these children are reached early enough, “we can actually start to change brain functioning if we provide the right kind of repetitive and focused intervention,” Briggs says.

Parents Need to be Aggressive Champions
The American Academy of Pediatrics currently recommends that doctors screen children for autism at their 18-month well-child visit. Briggs adds that parents must become aggressive champions for their children.

“So much can depend on how good that parent is at advocating for the child,” says Briggs, noting that parents need to be aware not only of what services are available, but also which ones are best, which are not helpful and how to get the best care.

“That puts an incredible burden on parents,” she acknowledges. With the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting last week that autism now affects 1 in 88 children, it is becoming a burden shared by more and more American families.

Briggs says that the findings in the new study reflect the types of developmental trajectories she sees in children in her practice as director of the Healthy Steps program at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx (NY), which helps disadvantaged families access numerous services, including autism therapies, through their pediatricians’ office visits.

She describes working with a 5-year-old autistic boy and his family. The family said he would come home from kindergarten crying, but they couldn’t figure out what was wrong.

Finally, he described how he felt while he waited for his mother to pick him up in the school’s cafeteria:
“There were so many echoes bouncing off the walls that it felt like people were having a party in my head and they wouldn’t turn down the music,” he said.

Identifying the problem led Briggs to enroll the boy in listening therapy, which helped him cope with his sensitivity to sounds.

When such sensory issues, which are common in autism, can be mitigated, children become far less stressed and far better able to learn other skills like social interaction and communication.

Most children from disadvantaged backgrounds aren’t able to get these kinds of services, however. “If we still see these huge differences in children with autism based on socioeconomic factors, we clearly don’t have enough programs or haven’t made them available enough,” Briggs says.

The research was published in Pediatrics.

Girls Approaching Puberty Before Age 10 - A New ‘Normal’?

One day last year when her daughter, Ainsley, was 9, Tracee Sioux pulled her out of her elementary school in Fort Collins, Colo., and drove her an hour south, to Longmont, in hopes of finding a satisfying reason that Ainsley began growing pubic hair at age 6.

Ainsley was the tallest child in her third-grade class. She had a thick, enviable blond-streaked ponytail and big feet, like a puppy’s. The curves of her Levi’s matched her mother’s.

“How was your day?” Tracee asked Ainsley as she climbed in the car.

“Pretty good.”

“What did you do at a recess?”

“I played on the slide with my friends.”

In the back seat, Ainsley wiggled out of her pink parka and looked in her backpack for her Harry Potter book. 

Over the past three years, Tracee — pretty and well-put-together, wearing a burnt orange blouse that matched her necklace and her bag — had taken Ainsley to see several doctors. 

They ordered blood tests and bone-age X-rays and turned up nothing unusual. “The doctors always come back with these blank looks on their faces, and then they start redefining what normal is,” Tracee said as we drove down Interstate 25, a ribbon of asphalt that runs close to where the Great Plains bump up against the Rockies. “And I always just sit there thinking, What are you talking about, normal? Who gets pubic hair in first grade?” 

Fed up with mainstream physicians, Tracee began pursuing less conventional options. She tried giving Ainsley diindolylmethane, or DIM, a supplement that may or may not help a body balance its hormones. 

She also started a blog, the Girl Revolution, with a mission to “revolutionize the way we think about, treat and raise girls,” and the accompanying T.G.R. Body line of sunscreens and lotions marketed to tweens and described by Tracee as “natural, organic, craptastic-free products” containing “no estrogens, phytoestrogens, endocrine disrupters.”

None of this stopped Ainsley’s body from maturing ahead of its time.

Read more of this article here: Puberty Before Age 10 - A New ‘Normal’? - NYTimes.com