The common causes of short stature in children are as follows: 1. Growth hormone deficiency: It is the most common cause of height growth disorder, mainly because the pituitary gland is damaged due to the presence of such things as fetal malposition, prolonged labor and birth asphyxia during the child’s delivery, which causes insufficient secretion of growth hormone resulting in slow growth. In addition to abnormal birth history, these children often show short but proportional stature, childish face, normal intelligence, and bone age significantly behind the actual age. The growth hormone stimulation test suggests partial or complete lack of growth hormone. After the diagnosis, recombinant human growth hormone replacement therapy should be given, which is effective for growth hormone treatment before epiphyseal closure.
2. Idiopathic dwarfism: The main manifestation is insufficient growth in childhood leading to significant short stature with normal or low growth rate, whose growth hormone is within the normal range, and the diagnosis needs to exclude all known etiologies. Foreign studies have found that it is related to gene deletion or mutation.
3. Inherited metabolic diseases: common chromosomal disorders, common in girls with dwarfism, some children often do not have obvious signs and have different clinical manifestations, so karyotype analysis is needed for such children, especially girls. Prevention of such diseases is the key, good premarital examination, genetic counseling, prenatal examination, to avoid and reduce the transmission of disease-causing genes.
Precocious puberty: In recent years, the incidence of precocious puberty has gradually increased, and the skeletal growth of such children is accelerated and the epiphysis closes early. Because of the rapid growth of children in the early stage, parents fail to pay attention to them, but when they visit the doctor for short growth, they are already in the late stage of youth development, and the epiphysis is close to closing, so the treatment effect is not ideal. These children often have a history of nutritional supplement intake, so it is very necessary to educate parents about precocious puberty.
5. Intrauterine growth retardation: It is mainly due to insufficient nutritional intake during maternal pregnancy or placental factors that make the fetus undernourished or hypoxic, so intrauterine growth retardation should be prevented during maternal pregnancy.
6. Malnutrition stunting: The main reason is insufficient nutritional intake due to postnatal feeding, obvious weight loss and reduction of subcutaneous fat. This kind of growth retardation is temporary, and generally as long as sufficient nutritional intake is restored and adjusted to a reasonable diet structure, growth can be accelerated, i.e. catching up with growth.
7, somatic puberty delay: mainly seen in boys, delayed spontaneous puberty development, still may make its lifelong height and sexual maturity to normal levels, this is a variation in normal growth and development, mainly regular follow-up, monitoring the rate of height growth.
8, hepatitis B, nephrotic syndrome, congenital heart disease and other chronic diseases: the impact on height is very obvious, the key is to diagnose and treat the original disease, remove the curative factors in order to fundamentally improve the growth of height.
9.Low birth weight babies, premature babies, babies less than gestational age: are non-disease dwarfism, the common feature is that they are often short at birth, but the growth rate is normal, and their height is always lower than normal. Therefore, it is important to treat height increase early to not lead to lifelong dwarfism. Preventive care should be done from infancy onwards, and regular physical examinations should be performed to understand the annual height growth rate so that the growth can be analyzed for delayed growth.