Collaborative Research: Disentangling the effects of extrinsic mortality risk and energy availability on adolescent maturation

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Both environmental and social factors are known to affect the timing of maturation at adolescence. Yet little is known about how these factors interact, vary with socioeconomic status, and differ for boys and girls. The aim of the current project is to disentangle the effects of nutrition and disease from several understudied factors on the timing of puberty in adolescents developing within contexts that present a wide range of social and environmental challenges. The project will study puberty as a set of physical, hormonal, and behavioral changes, allowing for a better assessment of factors affecting maturation in boys and girls. The research will address theoretical questions related to the evolution of the unique human pattern of growth and development. Insights from this work may also inform public health interventions related to adolescence. The project will train undergraduate and graduate students from under-represented minorities and will enhance research collaborations and infrastructures.Theory and evidence suggest that individuals often accelerate development in response to cues of extrinsic mortality risk and decelerate development in response to disease or low energy availability. This project will examine the individual and combined effects of energy availability and cues of extrinsic mortality on the timing of puberty by longitudinally quantifying differences in the magnitude, tempo, and velocity of maturation across a diverse sample of youth facing a variety of different social and environmental stressors. It will employ a comprehensive set of measures in both boys and girls, including novel measures of male development (e.g., voice pitch), and conventional measures such as age at menarche, somatic growth, hormone levels, and self-reported Tanner stages. Research will be carried out in two locations with a wide range of variation in key measures to facilitate robust findings. Statistical models will be used to partition variation in measures of puberty into effects due to different social and environmental factors, and to assess whether measuring of the timing of puberty are associated with adolescents’ reproductive, educational, and life-course aspirations.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.