Stature

I read this article yesterday in the Times about the use of human growth hormone on children.

Specifically, the article decries the assumption that doctors and scientists (and subsequently - parents) have adhered to for years - that is, that a child of unusually short stature will have mental and emotional adjustment issues as a direct result of their short stature. Stephen Hall, the writer, speaks to people at all levels of the debate (including those in the pharmaceutical industry) and basically concludes that there is no hard evidence whatsoever that a person's quality of life is improved through the use of human growth hormones.

They never really give the height designations of when and how often these drugs can be prescribed. Decades ago, they were reserved only for those medical cases in which a child was actually deficient in the hormone - the government regulated the treatment, and these rare cases received it at no charge. When they figured out how to produce the hormone without having to go through the painstaking process of extracting it from cadavers, the potential for its use skyrocketed.

Of course it did.

The article gets rather heavy on facts and figures 2/3rds of the way in which makes it a bit dense, but what I found most interesting was the implied conclusion that it was not the height factor itself that was effecting the emotional development of the children, rather it was the way that the child (and more important - the adults, namely the parents) dealt with it that seemed to have the greatest effect.

Apparently, one of the few follow-up studies done on the effects of the hormone revealed that:

"In an earlier study, European researchers could find no significant differences in the quality of life between young adults who had been treated with growth hormone as children and a control group of adults (equally short as children) who had not - except that adults who had taken the drug as children had a romantic partner less often than those who hadn't used it."

Hmmm.

Towards the end of the article Hall (who was himself short as a child, though he never mentions whether he matured into a shorter-than-average adult) poses this question:

"(In prescribing human growth hormone) do we accidentally diminish a child by focusing on height rather than on helping him bulk up his emotional muscle and resilience - muscles that will always prove useful in adulthood?"

It's an interesting question.