Current pharmaceutical biotechnology
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Curr Pharm Biotechnol · Jul 2000
ReviewGrowth velocity, final height and bone mineral metabolism of short children treated long term with growth hormone.
Since human recombinant growth hormone (GH) became available a large number of short GH deficient and GH-sufficient children have been treated with growth hormone. Growth hormone deficient patients have been followed to final height and several studies have shown that even when treated with GH from very early on in life they tend to end up shorter than their target height. There is, however, a clear increase in their growth velocities particularly during the first 4-5 years of GH therapy so that patients end up with a height-SD score of aproximately -0.8. ⋯ Some 10-20% of children born with intrauterine growth retardation (IUGR) end up short and we had already demonstrated 20 years ago how 2 years of GH therapy were capable of increasing their growth velocities significantly with an improvement of their height-SD scores. Recent studies mainly from Europe have corroborated this data long term, so that IUGR children have been shown by de Zegher et al. to increase their growth velocities and their height for age after 6 years of treatment, entering into the low normal centiles of their growth curves for age. Long term studies of these children to final height will be necessary to determine the usefulness and safety of this form of therapy.