With summer approaching, the topic of children’s growth and development health has once again aroused social concern. At present, there are 7 million children with dwarfism in need of treatment in China, but less than 30,000 patients actually receive reasonable treatment every year. Children and their parents should not blindly believe in various concepts of “height increase”, not to mention “talking about hormones”. Early diagnosis and symptomatic treatment with growth hormone injections can completely improve height.
“Many parents don’t know that short stature can be a pathological condition, and they don’t know that such diseases can be treated with intervention.” Many parents have cognitive misconceptions about their children’s height: they blindly wait for their children’s height to “scamper” when they get older; they blindly listen to advertisements and give their children so-called “height increasing drugs”, health products or use “physical Instead, they have doubts about the regular treatment drug growth hormone because it contains the word “hormone”.
When a child grows slowly or even does not grow, many parents feel that it is a lack of nutrition and calcium, and all kinds of supplements, health supplements, height increasing drugs and calcium supplements are greeted to the child. This is a big misunderstanding of parents about short stature. Among children with short stature, a considerable part of them are caused by the lack of human growth hormone. Growth hormone is a protein secreted by the anterior pituitary gland and is the main hormone that promotes human growth. It can stimulate the differentiation and proliferation of epiphyseal chondrocytes and the growth of long bones in children, making the human body taller and regulating material metabolism and energy balance. If the patient’s growth hormone secretion is insufficient or disordered, normal growth will be affected. For these children, the most effective way is to supplement human growth hormone. The chemical structure of recombinant human growth hormone is identical to that of the natural human secretion. Recombinant human growth hormone is the only effective drug approved by the State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA) to promote growth in children. However, many parents nowadays have ‘hormone phobia’, thinking that hormones must have side effects such as fatness, ugliness and endocrine disorders, and some even refuse to receive treatment.
In fact, the earlier the intervention for dwarf patients, the more the adult height of the affected children can be maximized. For children who need to use growth hormone, injection treatment is only effective if it is given before the epiphysis closes, and to some extent, treating this type of dwarfism is also a race against the growth rate of the epiphysis.
If your child always ranks in the top three in class or is shorter than children of the same age, parents should pay attention and take your child to the pediatric endocrinology clinic of a regular hospital.
Finally, parents should also be reminded that human growth hormone is a kind of protein that can only be effectively absorbed through injection, and if taken orally, it will be broken down by the digestive system and become ineffective. For drugs that claim to be taken orally to increase height, they are generally not to be trusted.