The Effect of Childhood Overweight and Obesity and Genetic Factors on Puberty Development: a Prospective Cohort Study

Precocious puberty and childhood overweight and obesity are important public health problems that both had adverse effects, which including psychological symptom in childhood, short final height or reproductive dysfunction in adulthood, on children's physical and psychological development.The prevalence of precocious puberty and childhood overweight and obesity are both high, and a growing body of epidemiological studies suggested that there was a close relationship of childhood overweight and obesity with puberty development, especially in girls. However, the underlying mechanism between them is unclear. Existing evidence shows that the occurrence of precocious puberty and overweight and obesity are the result of interaction of multiple factors, which consists growth environment and genetics, and many previous studies provided that more overlapping genes existed between obesity and precocious puberty patients, suggesting that common genes may result in these diseases. Therefore, based on a case control study, which will investigate the associations between obesity pleiotropic genes and early puberty, the researchers will collect information related to obesity, growth environment factors and risk genes in this study to evaluate the relationships of these related factors and precocious puberty, and to further explore whether there exists biological interaction effects of these risk factors on sexual precocity. This project has been approved by the Ethics Committee of Shanghai Children's Medical Center.