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

众所周知，环境和社会因素都会影响青春期的成熟时间。然而，对于这些因素如何相互作用，如何随社会经济地位的不同而变化，以及在男孩和女孩之间的差异，我们知之甚少。当前项目的目的是将营养和疾病的影响从几个未被充分研究的因素中分离出来，这些因素对青少年青春期的时间产生影响，这些因素是在存在广泛的社会和环境挑战的背景下发展起来的。该项目将把青春期作为一系列身体、荷尔蒙和行为变化来研究，以便更好地评估影响男孩和女孩成熟的因素。这项研究将解决与人类独特的生长和发展模式的演变有关的理论问题。这项工作的见解也可能为与青春期有关的公共卫生干预提供信息。该项目将培训来自代表性不足的少数民族的本科生和研究生，并将加强研究合作和基础设施。理论和证据表明，个体往往在外部死亡风险提示下加速发育，而在疾病或低能量可用性提示下减慢发育。本项目将通过纵向量化面对各种不同社会和环境压力的不同青年样本中成熟的幅度、节奏和速度的差异，研究能量可用性和外在死亡率线索对青春期时间的个体和综合影响。它将对男孩和女孩采用一套全面的测量方法，包括男性发展的新方法（例如，音高），以及传统的方法，如初潮年龄、身体生长、激素水平和自我报告的坦纳阶段。研究将在两个地点进行，在关键措施方面有很大差异，以促进强有力的发现。统计模型将用于将青春期测量的变化划分为由于不同的社会和环境因素而产生的影响，并评估青春期时间的测量是否与青少年的生殖、教育和生命历程愿望有关。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.