Yangcheng Evening News reporter Xue Renzheng correspondent Bai Tian
"I heard that inhibiting bone age growth can 'trick' the body and make the child grow taller all the time?" Recently, this "heightening" method has spread among the circle of friends of parents. In order to make their children grow taller, some parents choose to give their children medicine and injections to inhibit bone age, in an attempt to close bones more slowly and "buy time" for their children to grow taller.
Is this method of "heightening" reliable? Xie Lichun, deputy chief physician of pediatrics at the Huangpu Campus of the Third Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University, told the Yangcheng Evening News reporter: "By inhibiting bone age, children may grow taller, but the side effects of taking drugs and injections are difficult to predict." As a doctor, I don't recommend doing this routinely. ”
Inhibition of bone age is mostly used to treat diseases
Is bone age the time it takes for bones to grow? What does age have to do with it? Xie Lichun introduced that bone age is a commonly used detection index for bone examination, which refers to the relationship between the appearance and healing time of osskeletized bone nucleus and actual age. It is the abbreviation of bone age, which represents bone maturity.
"Human age is actually calculated by biological age and biological age." Xie Lichun introduced that the year, month and day calculated from birth are called biological age, representing the length of time since birth. The biological age is commonly known as "bone age", which can judge the degree of development.
According to reports, bone age measurement is usually used to check the biological age of children and monitor the child's development, such as primary short stature, family hereditary short stature, precocious puberty, intrauterine growth retardation and constitutional puberty retardation will be reflected in bone age.
"Usually, the gap between bone age and age is not more than one year." Xie Lichun said that if the difference between bone age and age exceeds this range, it is called advanced bone age or delayed bone age, and further examination is needed to confirm the physical condition. If bone age needs to be suppressed, it is mainly because bone age development does not match the actual age, and is related to precocious puberty, hyperthyroidism, adrenal tumors and other conditions.
Rashly suppressing bone age may cause health effects
"Bone age suppression can only be achieved when there is a definite disease that needs to be treated and the patient is eligible for medication." Xie Lichun said that most of the drugs used to suppress bone age are prescription drugs, made for the purpose of treating certain diseases, and if there is no such disease and rashly use drugs, it is likely to cause a series of unpredictable health damage such as obesity, insulin resistance, and disrupting the normal hormone secretion of children.
Xie Lichun believes that the way to inhibit bone age supplementation to gain development time for children only exists in theory, and there are many factors to consider in practical application, and it is not recommended that normally developing children carry out the so-called "height" by inhibiting bone age.
In addition, if it is necessary to suppress bone age due to reasons such as poor growth, it should be before the age of 8. "Once this age is passed, even if the bone age is suppressed, it is difficult for the child's development to keep up with normal children." Xie Lichun said.
It is worth mentioning that a single bone age prediction can only represent the child's bone maturity at that time. If you want to know the overall development of the child, you need to combine the child's hormone status, nutritional status and other conditions, by a professional physician comprehensive assessment, dynamic monitoring to determine, must not because of a bone age measurement rashly let the child take medicine.