[Does exposure to cigarette smoke influence girls maturation?]. / Czy ekspozycja na palenie papierosów w srodowisku rodzinnym wplywa na tempo rozwoju dziewczat?

A study of of 26008 school-girls in three biggest cities of Upper Silesia, revealed that 76% of the girls were passively exposed to tobacco smoke by their smoking parents. In the present paper it is shown that the age at menarche of the daughters of smoking mothers is lower than the age at menarche of daughters of mothers who do not smoke. This effect appears to be independent of the girl's family size, economic situation of the family or parental education. Similar influence of smoking father on the menarcheal age of the daughters could be detected only in groups of families with high SES.

Deceleration of age at menarche in Poland.

The purpose of this paper is to describe secular growth changes in age at menarche of girls in Poland during the past 40 years. For this purpose data obtained from four consecutive surveys conducted in 1955, 1966, 1978 and 1988 were analysed. Each cohort was selected from settlements: big cities, small towns (approximately 10,000 inhabitants) and villages. Data regarding schoolgirls aged 7-18 years were collected by the status quo method. It was found that after the continuous trend towards an earlier maturation of Polish girls from 1955 to 1978 a substantial slowing down, and even a reverse trend, was observed. The deceleration of the age at menarche is most marked among girls from small towns. The results seem to have been caused by the retardation of menarcheal age in social groups which in the previous examinations were the earliest maturers.

Social-class gradients in menarcheal age in Poland.

In a sample of approx. 19 000 Polish schoolgirls from the three largest cities of the Upper Silesia conurbation, menarcheal age was studied in relation to parental education (four levels) and father's occupation (12 groups). Menarcheal age tends to increase with decreasing parental education, although the gradient is not steep. When families below a certain level of economic standing are discarded from the best-educated and the least-well-educated groups, mean menarcheal age, surprisingly, decreases much more in the former than in the latter. Mean menarcheal ages for girls from different occupational groups range from 12.82 to 13.30 years and form the following sequence, in increasing order: managers--police--non-technical professionals--engineers, technicians and foremen--skilled industrial workers and small businessmen--unskilled workers--coal-miners. Mean menarcheal age for an occupational group is strongly dependent upon the group's socio-economic status, the latter being defined in terms of parental education, family income, family size, and dwelling conditions. However, daughters of men in the police force mature significantly earlier, and daughters of coal-miners significantly later, than would be expected from each group's rank in socio-economic status. The findings are compared with the results of other recent studies of social gradients in menarcheal age in Poland.