Girls from poor U.S. families feel they're missing out on vital life lessons about the female body, researchers say.
Girls repeatedly said they felt ill-informed about menstruation and other changes related to puberty, according to researchers who reviewed papers published from 2000 to 2014.
"Puberty is the cornerstone of reproductive development," study co-author Marni Sommer, an associate professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health in New York City, said in a university news release. "Therefore, the transition through puberty is a critical period of development that provides an important opportunity to build a healthy foundation for sexual and reproductive health. Given the importance of this transition, the research is striking in its lack of quantity and quality to date."
For the study, researchers at Columbia and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore reviewed 20 prior articles to evaluate the experiences of poor black, white and Hispanic girls living in cities in the northeast United States.
[For more of this story go to https://consumer.healthday.com...-puberty-718443.html]
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