Since the summer holidays, many parents are keen to take their children to the hospital to measure their bone age, some measured developmental delay, some measured precocious puberty, is this measurement scientific and is it helpful for guiding parents? Bone age is not necessarily the same as the actual age. Bone age prediction is still a good way to monitor the growth and development of minors and is a relatively scientific means of predicting height.
Parents should pay attention to their children’s bone age as early as possible to avoid the occurrence of short children. Bone age refers to the age of the bones, or bone age for short. Bone age and actual age are not necessarily the same, and the growth of a person’s height is more related to bone age than to actual age. Generally speaking, when a girl’s bone age exceeds 15 years old and a boy’s bone age exceeds 17 years old, most of the epiphyses have closed and there is little chance of further growth. A child’s final height is determined by bone age, not by age. There was a boy who had a “throat knot” at the age of 13, and he didn’t grow for a year or two, and his height was less than 1.60 meters.
The mother brought her son to the clinic, but once she measured his bone age, he was over 15 to 18 years old, and he was too mature to grow any taller. The misconceptions that lead to the eventual shortage of children are the “ignorance” of parents. The biggest misconception is that people are used to thinking that there is a difference between “early growth” and “late growth”, and that the younger the bone age, the better, and that children will always grow taller in the end, and they are obsessed with waiting for a miracle to happen.
As an endocrinologist, we often come across such cases: boys aged 17 to 18 years old are only 125 to 129 cm in height, and their bone age is only 7 to 9 years old. These children are short because of growth hormone deficiency, and even though their bone age is significantly behind their actual age, they will not grow in size eventually. Growth hormone deficiency is the most common type of short stature and is more common in boys. Most of them are 1 to 2 heads (10 to 20 cm) shorter than their classmates from kindergarten or elementary school. In addition, short stature is also related to family genetics: the skeletal age is more than 2 years behind the actual age from early childhood to adulthood, and most of them have delayed puberty (18-year-old boys do not have enlarged penis or testicles, nor do they have voice change or long laryngeal nodes). If one parent (or one of the parents) is short, it can affect the child’s height; or the family has its own unique growth pattern, such as not “jumping up” during puberty, resulting in eventual “shortness”. If the child’s height is not ideal, it is recommended that parents should not blindly apply some so-called “height-enhancing drugs and supplies” without scientific basis; nor should they listen to nature, but should do the bone age test as early as possible to clarify the cause and grasp the best time to treat children with short stature.