Item Detail
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19633
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0
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0
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English
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Variation in the Age of Menarche Among Mormons in Ogden, Utah : A Mutifactorial Study
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Salt Lake City, UT
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University of Utah
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Ph.D.
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"This is a cross-sectional, retrospective study of the variation of age of menarche among 277 Mormon, Caucasian females native to Ogden, Utah, born between 1960 and 1963. Data were gathered through hour-long interviews pertaining to personal and family background, medical and menstrual histories, exercise and sleep patterns, and a variety of anthropometric measurements and indices to determine body size, shape, constitution, and composition. The variation in menarcheal age was investigated epidemiologically and ecologically to locate, test, and interpret interrelationships among the age of menarche and over 300 selected endogenous and exogenous variables for a well-controlled sample population. Analysis entailed bivariate and multivariate techniques to ascertain multifactorial intercorrelations and system definition. Mean age of menarche for this sample is 13.21 (+OR-) 0.08 (S.D. = (+OR-)1.3), with an age range of 9.59 to 17.08 years. The bivariate results demonstrate very low correlations of the individual variables with age of menarche. The results of a principal-components factor analysis indicate that many of the variables can be reduced to a smaller subset of 20 factors. A stepwise multiple regression test affirms that the independent contributions of the variables are small, but the combined contributions of the 84 best predictor variables can explain over 86% of the variance in menarcheal age for this population. Results of a stepwise discriminant analysis indicate that 38 of the variables are the best discriminators between early-maturers and late-maturers in the sample, achieving 97% accuracy in discrimination. In general, the multivariate results show that the age of menarche is a multicausal event, and that the variation in this age is systematic for this sample population, with an overall rank order of constraints on the age as follows: (1) familial pattern of menarcheal age, (2) physical exercise patterns, (3) body size, shape, constitution, and composition, (4) personal life-style and family background, (5) sleep patterns, and (6) menstrual and seasonality patterns. New relationships to menarcheal age are discovered pertaining to amount of nightly sleep, number of menstruating females in the household at menarche, sibship age interval, the type, amounts, and timing of exercise, menarcheal solstice adjacency, menstrual features, and body constitution." [Author's abstract]