Since the summer holidays, many parents are keen to take their children to the hospital to measure their bone age, some of them have measured developmental delay, some have 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 refers to the age of the bones, or bone age for short. While bone age and actual age are not necessarily the same, a person’s height growth is more related to bone age rather than depending on 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 growing taller. 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, and once the bone age was measured, it was more than 15 to 18 years old, which is basically mature and cannot grow taller, so the mother cried sadly. Such cases occur repeatedly in the endocrinology department of Dalian Children’s Hospital. The misconceptions that lead to children’s eventual dwarfism Will parents’ “ignorance” lead to children’s eventual “dwarfism”? Zhao Xiaohong said that the biggest misconception is that people are used to thinking that people have “early growth” and “late growth”, and that the younger the bone age, the better, and that children will always grow taller eventually, and they are obsessed with waiting for a miracle to happen. However, as an endocrinologist, Zhang Qin often encounters such cases: boys aged 17 to 18 are only 125 to 129 cm in height, and their bone age is only 7 to 9 years old. The reason for these children’s short stature is 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 inheritance. The parents (or one of them) are short, which affects the child’s height; or the family has its own unique growth pattern, such as not “jumping up” during puberty, resulting in eventual “short”. If the child’s height is not ideal, Zhao Xiaohong suggests that parents should not rush to the doctor and blindly apply some so-called “height-enhancing drugs and supplies” that have no scientific basis; nor should they listen to nature, but should do the bone age test as soon as possible to clarify the cause and grasp the best treatment time for children with short stature.