High early puberty rates alarm doctors

Children in China's main cities are reaching puberty too early - a condition known as sexual precocity - and at a much higher rate than those in Western countries.

A Beijing doctor, who runs the city's first sexual precocity clinic, said her research into the condition showed that in Shanghai, the rate was as high as 1 percent.

"That is amazing because the rate in most Western countries is between 0.02 and 0.01 percent," said Kong Yuanyuan, whose clinic is at the Beijing Maternal and Child Healthcare Hospital.