Luo Buquan, male, Dazhou, Sichuan, 24 years old, 1 meter 21; Qin Yiqin, female, Zunyi, Guizhou, 8 years old, 0.97 meters tall; Liu Zulin, male, Dazu, Chongqing, 30 years old, 1 meter 35 meters tall before treatment, yesterday, in Chongqing Children’s Palace held the “Red Cross Angel Program – Kinsey dwarf children medical aid project At the 2012 Southwest Regional Donation Ceremony held yesterday at the Chongqing Children’s Palace, nine dwarf children from Chongqing, Sichuan and Guizhou received a half-year supply of growth hormone drugs.
In real life, you may have seen or heard of pocket-sized people like Liu Zulin and Luo Buquan, but they are all dwarf patients. So, how is dwarfism determined, what are the dangers and how to intervene? For parents of children and adolescents in the growth and development stage, this is a problem that should be of special concern.
Most parents have misconceptions about dwarfism What is dwarfism? Professor Liao Wei, deputy director of pediatrics at Xinqiao Hospital, explained that the standard deviation method and height percentile method are used to determine short stature in clinical practice.
In fairy tales, the seven dwarfs and Snow White live happily in the big forest; however, in real life, there are too many problems brought by short stature. First of all, dwarfism is likely to cause adverse effects on the psychology and personality of the affected children. University graduate height of only 1 meter 29 Liu Zulin told reporters that he once in three months in succession dozens of job hunting were rejected, and now over 30 years old have not had a relationship …… “However, most parents have varying degrees of misconceptions and misconceptions about their children’s height. ” Professor Liao Wei stressed with regret that many parents believe that children do not grow now will certainly grow in the future, parents high children will also be high, the growth of bad supplementation calcium will be able to solve the problem, in the discovery of child growth retardation blindly waiting, arbitrarily believe in advertising to children taking height-enhancing health products or choose informal medical institutions to consult, haphazard calcium supplementation and so on, often delaying the best intervention of children expected to cause lifelong pain The best intervention is often delayed, resulting in lifelong pain and regret.
The best treatment period for children with dwarfism is early diagnosis, 3-12 years old. In response to the misconceptions of most parents, Professor Liao Wei, deputy director of pediatrics at Xinqiao Hospital, said that dwarfism in clinical practice emphasizes early detection, early diagnosis and early treatment, and the earlier the treatment, the better the effect and the lower the cost. Research shows that the younger the child is, the more active the cartilage layer of the epiphysis is, the greater the growth potential and space, the more sensitive to treatment, the better the growth effect; and the younger the child is, the lighter the weight, the smaller the dose of medication, the smaller the cost, 3-12 years old is the best treatment period for dwarfism. Therefore, it is important not to wait until the later stages of development, such as 15-18 years old, to treat the child, when the epiphysis is close to closing and the growth potential is very small, it is no longer possible to reach the ideal height.
“We often encounter children who are 16 or 17 years old when they come to the clinic, and the bone age film shows that their epiphyses are already closed, which is both painful and helpless for us as doctors.” Professor Liao Wei said, “Take Liu Zulin as an example, if he had received and adhered to exogenous recombinant human growth hormone treatment before the age of 12, his height would certainly have fully reached its normal value by now, and the cost of treatment would have been less than half of what it is now, and he would have experienced a lot less humiliation and hardship as an adult.”
In 2007, the Ministry of Labor and Social Security issued a report on the basic medical insurance for urban residents. In 2007, the Ministry of Labor and Social Security issued the “Notice on Issues Related to Children’s Medication for Urban Residents’ Basic Medical Insurance”, which clearly stipulated that children with growth hormone deficiency caused by dwarfism are included in the scope of medical insurance reimbursement.
However, only a few regions such as Shanghai, Hangzhou and Tianjin have achieved this goal, for example, children with dwarfism in Shanghai can be reimbursed 50% of their medical expenses, but most regions in China have not yet included this disease in their medical insurance, and some families with children who are not well-off still bear heavy financial pressure, and it often happens that some patients’ families stop treating their children because of financial reasons.
The president of Chongqing Dwarf Association, Wei Zeyang, said that although short stature is not life-threatening, it is enough to seriously reduce the quality of life and the happiness of a person’s family. According to the population base and epidemiological statistics, the number of children and adolescents with growth retardation in Chongqing alone is over 100,000, which is by no means a number that can be ignored by society. However, at present, there is only one dwarfism relief fund in the country, the Kinsey Medical Relief Program for Dwarf Children, and the annual relief amount of 1 million is a drop in the bucket compared to the millions of dwarfism patients nationwide. Pediatricians from the five major hospitals in the main city also agreed and supported this.