Hardy, Rebecca (2015) Pubertal maturation and affective symptoms in adolescence and adulthood: evidence from a prospective birth cohort. Development and Psychopathology, 27 (4pt1). pp. 1331 -1340 This version is available from Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/49955/ This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published version.
Copyright and reuse:Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University.Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available.Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. (Copeland, Shanahan, Costello, & Angold, 2011;Gaysina, Pierce, et al., 2011). Therefore, adolescence can be considered as a high-risk developmental period for the onset and intensification of depression and anxiety symptoms (Inderbitzen & Hope, 1995;Macaulay & Kleinknecht, 1989 Leen-Feldner, & Hayward, 2009). This measure is particularly valuable since it can be used to identify sub-groups of youth that might be at particular risk for affective disorders later in life.
PUBERTY AND LIFE COURSE AFFECTIVE SYMPTOMSMost, although not all, longitudinal studies following adolescent girls through puberty have found that early age at menarche was associated with increased risk of depressive symptoms during adolescence (Canals, Marti-Henneberg, Fernandez-Ballart, Cliville, & Domenech, 1992;Laitinen-Krispijn, van der, & Verhulst, 1999;Patton et al., 2008). There have been fewer studies in boys, and the evidence that exists is more inconsistent than that for girls, with some studies reporting a significant association between early pubertal maturation PUBERTY AND LIFE COURSE AFFECTIVE SYMPTOMS 4 and affective symptoms (Ge, Conger, & Elder, 2001), while others reporting an association between later pubertal maturation and depression (Angold, Costello, & Worthman, 1998;Conley & Rudolph, 2009;Laitinen-Krispijn, van der, & Verhulst, 1999), or no association (Graber, Seeley, Brooks-Gunn, & Lewinsohn, 2004;Patton, et al., 2008). The inconsistency in the results may be due to differences between studies in the measures of depression, anxiety, or combinations of both, and the small sample sizes of some studies meaning that they might lack statistical power to detect an...