With the arrival of the winter holidays, the number of pediatric dwarf clinics at Xinqiao Hospital of the Third Military Medical University has increased dramatically, and about 70% of them are diagnosed as “idiopathic dwarfism”. However, most parents mistakenly believe that idiopathic dwarfism is not a disease and choose not to intervene or treat it.
Idiopathic dwarfism is a special growth disorder. If children with idiopathic dwarfism are not detected and treated early, their lifelong height will be about 160cm for boys and 150cm for girls, which may affect their quality of life.
Idiopathic dwarfism has a high incidence and most parents choose not to treat it. Idiopathic dwarfism refers to dwarfism of unknown etiology, i.e., short stature without underlying pathological states, and is the most common cause of short stature in childhood. disorders, normal diet, and growth hormone stimulation test in the normal range. In other words, the child does not look abnormal, but is shorter than his peers in height. The incidence of idiopathic dwarfism is about 2.5%, accounting for about 70% of the total incidence of dwarfism.
Since the cause of idiopathic dwarfism is not yet clinically clear, many parents literally believe that idiopathic dwarfism is not a disease and wait for their children to grow in adolescence with the traditional concept of “early growth and late growth” and “twenty-three scurrying”. It is not right to wait until the age of 14 or 15, or even 17 or 18. If not treated, idiopathic dwarfism will seriously affect the child’s lifelong height and may lead to difficulties in schooling, employment, marriage and socialization in adulthood, and also affect the child’s personality development.
This is often the case in outpatient clinics, where some older children are diagnosed with idiopathic dwarfism, and as a result, parents are reluctant to opt for treatment. A few years later, the parents bring the child to the hospital again because the child is slow to grow taller, but it turns out that the child’s bone age is close to maturity and there is no way to grow taller through treatment, so the lifelong height regret is fixed.