Prediction of pubertal maturation from anthropometric variables: proposal for a non-invasive method.

Abstract

Identifying new perspectives for the development of methods to analyze biological maturation is a very important step for the selection of sports talent. The current study proposed a non-invasive method for evaluating the pubertal status of young males based on anthropometric variables. Two hundred six male participants between 8 and 18 years old were evaluated, selected randomly from a school in Natal, Brazil. Seven anthropometric variables were evaluated, as recommended by ISAK, in addition to the pubertal stages being measured through analysis of genital development. The statistics were represented through means and standard deviations of the groups. An Analysis of Variance and multivariate method of discriminative analysis were performed to compare groups and create the predictive equation. The significant differences in the anthropometric variables between the pubertal stages were able to predict the stage of maturity of the participants with an accuracy of 75%. Through a validation sample (N.=52), the level of agreement between the proposed equation and the objective method was excellent, presenting an index of 0.840. The predicted equation proposed in this study demonstrated a high level of validity, presenting it as a new alternative for the evaluation of pubertal maturity of male youths.