Apart from genes environment and lifestyle factors that lead to chemical modifications of human genes can also influence a child's pubertal timing a new study has found. Chemical modifications of the human genome -- epigenetic modifications -- occur when girls and boys enter puberty. The findings showed that epigenetic changes cause the unregulation of genes that are important for pubertal development. Further highly specific changes in a child's DNA methylation -- a process by which methyl groups are added to DNA-- could differentiate children according to whether they had entered puberty or not and thus may be used to predict
