ESPE Abstracts

Background: GH treatment is proven to increase adult final height in some pathology and first year response is assumed as an index of treatment’s effectiveness.

Objective and hypotheses: Identify the prevalence of each indication in children treated with GH in our hospital and evaluate the first year response to treatment.

Method: We retrospectively analysed the files of 30 patients followed for short stature and on GH treatment, using WHO Growth data. For statistic analysis we used SPSS v21.

Results: 56.7% of patients are girls and 43.3% are boys. They were referred with the mean aged of 8.3±3.26 years and started GH therapy with 9.57±3.23 years. GH deficiency (GHD) was diagnosed on 76.7%, Turner Syndrome (TS) on 16.7%, and small for gestation age (SGA) on 6.6%. The GHD and SGA patients had, before treatment, a mean Height (cm) SD of −2.76±0.9 and a mean BMI SD of −0.42±2.23. Bone age was delayed by 1.8±1.01 years. All GHD patients were submitted to two GH stimulation tests: 25 did clonidine test, 20 L-Dopa test, and 4 the hypoglycaemia test (mean GH peaks: 5.8±3.64, 3.7±1.9 and 7.5±3.5 ng/ml). After first year of treatment, on GHD and SGA patients, Height SD was −2.14±0.85 and BMI SD was −0.2±1.22. ΔHeight SD was 0.61±0.45. Statistic significance was found between Height SD (P=0.001) and BMI SD (P=0.001), before and after treatment. Patients with TS had initially a Height SD of −3.12±0.8 and BMI SD of −1.2±0.66 and after a year a Height SD of −2.36±0.75 and BMI SD of −0.7±0.25. The ΔHeight SD in these patients was 0.76±0.05 cm.

Conclusion: In our population the first year response to treatment was good. A follow-up study is important to evaluate the final stature.