A common problem in the diagnosis of growth hormone deficiency dwarfism is that parents or children often fail to notice the slowing down of their children’s growth rate in time, and often wait until their height is significantly behind before paying attention to it. In addition, many parents often think of “dwarfism” as “late growth” and imagine that their children will have an unexpected period of growth during adolescence, but as a result, the best time to diagnose and treat dwarfism is missed. Therefore, clinicians and health care workers should assist parents to regularly check the height, calculate the growth rate, and closely observe the growth curve of their children. Early identification of the cause and early standardized treatment can avoid missing the good opportunity for growth. The earlier a child with GHD is identified, the more effective the treatment is and the more money is saved.
In addition, for some patients, growth retardation or decreased growth rate may be the early clinical manifestation of intracranial tumor, so for these patients, cranial MRI examination should be performed as much as possible to avoid missing the diagnosis and delaying the treatment. If parents find that their children are shorter than their peers, they should seek medical consultation in time to avoid delaying the best treatment for their children.
In our long-term clinical practice, we often encounter parents and children who are “high-minded”. With the improvement of living standard, the average height of our youth is gradually increasing, and the expectation of parents and society on children’s height is even “higher”. Many boys want to be as tall and graceful as Yao Ming, while girls are equally eager to be as tall and graceful as models.
However, there are objective rules for how tall a person’s body grows. If the parents themselves are not tall, but they want their children to grow up to one meter eight, or obviously the epiphysis has closed, can no longer grow, but still do not die. The use of some extreme means of height increase, such as bone amputation, or the abuse of growth hormone in children with normal growth, once the bone amputation may become infected, or even cause osteomyelitis, resulting in disability. After the surgery, it is not uncommon to see artificially unequal legs and abuse of growth hormone leading to acromegaly or secondary diabetes, at which point it is too late to regret.
Myth 3: Growth hormone therapy is not a panacea Research on the etiology of dwarfism shows that dwarfism caused by genetic factors and delayed youth development accounts for about 2/3, while pathological dwarfism including idiopathic dwarfism, growth hormone deficiency, precocious puberty, bone development disorder, chromosomal abnormalities, intrauterine growth retardation, Turner syndrome, etc. only accounts for 1/3. pituitary tumors. Therefore, in the diagnosis of dwarfism, the first thing is to clarify the cause of the disease. If the patient with dwarfism due to intracranial tumors is treated with growth hormone, the consequences will be serious.
At the same time, if you are satisfied with growth hormone treatment, but neglect comprehensive treatment such as balanced diet, exercise, quality sleep and proper psychological adjustment, the effect of growth hormone treatment will definitely be greatly affected, which will eventually cause great economic waste. Whether your dwarfism can be treated with hormone therapy can be determined only after the relevant examination, so as to avoid blind treatment leading to adverse consequences.