"Fight or don't fight?" Zhang Feng's (pseudonym) family has been entangled in a long period of entanglement. Hitting, with side effects, not hitting, will affect the child's height.
It's a dilemma. Behind the entanglement, there is more anxiety. This is the same problem that many parents face: height.
In order to grow taller, some parents began injecting growth hormone into their children, spending hundreds of thousands of yuan a year.
In fact, after the advent of recombinant human growth hormone as a drug to treat short stature diseases in children, height is no longer a natural consequence that is difficult to intervene.
Zhang Feng also finally decided to give her daughter Yu Yu (pseudonym) a kind of "sexual suppression injection". In more than half a year, they have spent nearly 100,000 yuan.
In addition to needles, these children go to bed early, jump rope, drink milk, and race against time. This also gives rise to concerns about high anxiety and substance abuse.
"Girls with early menarche, height will not grow normally"
"If a girl has early menarche, she will not grow to a normally developing height." This sentence is a small talk between the parents and Zhang Feng next to her when her daughter is in ballet class.
At first, the other party praised the height of the girl, "Your child can grow so tall at the age of 8, I am really envious." Zhang Feng said a few words, and the other party's mother then asked, "Did you measure the age of your child's bones?" ”
Zhang Feng knows that some parents in the class will organize groups to go to some specialist clinics to show their children's bone age.
In the past, Zhang Feng disdained to participate in the follow-up behavior of bone age measurement, but the sudden development of the girl's breasts made Zhang Feng a little flustered, and she has always attributed the high growth of the girl to her father's good genes, but she never thought of the possibility of precocious puberty.
At this time, looking back, Zhang Feng regretted that she had neglected her daughter's growth and development in the past few years.
In 2020, when you are 7 years old, the repeated epidemics, coupled with the original irregular diet and living schedule, have made your life "chaotic".
At first it was a mess of work and rest. If it is school, Zhang Feng will stuff an egg and soy milk into her bag; if it is an online class, Zhang Feng and her lover will catch up with the first online class of the girl, and breakfast is often eaten together with lunch.
Zhang Feng usually has a heavy mouth, loves to eat spicy, and adds soy sauce and salt according to the habit when cooking vegetables, and the girl eats with it, and also falls into the habit of heavy mouth. At noon, the girl is taking online classes at home, Zhang Feng and her husband generally work online, put the girl in the room, and there is no time to see if she has taken a nap. After dinner, according to the requirements of the class group, parents need to supervise their children's jump rope.
The intermittent campus life makes the girls always live an irregular life. Fortunately, the size of the girl grew quite fast, and Zhang Feng did not have any doubts.
However, she never expected that her daughter was actually precocious. The doctor told her that this had a lot to do with the child's lack of exercise and irregular diet.
Zhang Feng went to the Growth and Development Center to hang up a number for you. The results of the bone age tablet came out in less than 10 minutes.
According to the doctor's judgment, the bone age of the girl is nearly 9 and a half years old to 10 years old. Theoretically, bone age greater than 1 year of age but not more than 2 years old is on the larger side.
Coupled with the test results of ovarian and breast development, the doctor told Zhang Feng that the situation of the girl is "central precocious puberty", she is likely to have a situation where the menarche comes too early, and there is not much time for her to grow tall at that time, and she still has up to 1 to 2 centimeters of space to grow.
The doctor proposed two options for Zhang Feng: go with the flow or give a suppressive injection.
Going with the flow is to let the girl exercise more, adjust her diet, and go to bed early. Even if there is a menarche, according to the natural genetic height, the lowest girl can reach about 1 meter 55, and it is possible to grow to 1 meter 6.
The injection of sexual inhibition is to inhibit the development of children through long-term drug intervention, slow down the rapid growth of height, and inhibit the rapid maturity of bone age. To put it more bluntly, it is to let the time of menarche lag a little, and give the child a longer body time.
"According to the ideal, it will cost about 200,000 yuan to play for two years"
To fight or not to fight? Zhang Feng was entangled.
Zhang Feng herself is not very tall, 157CM she originally thought that finding a 180CM husband, will not let the girl face the problem of height.
After returning home, Zhang Feng pulled her daughter and husband to hold two family meetings. The husband's meaning is very clear, "The injection will definitely have side effects, and it is best for the child to go with the flow." ”
The girl's attitude wavered, one moment thinking that her father was right, and the next worrying that she really didn't grow up.
Zhang Feng herself has never been able to make up her mind: the high cost of treatment is not "a small amount of money that can be taken out anytime and anywhere" for her family; the doctor's sentence "side effects are not clear" also makes her frightened.
Three months later, it was time to make a decision, still in the ballet classroom.
Zhang Feng stood outside the classroom, watching her daughter wearing dancing shoes through the glass, confidently holding her head high, dancing in non-standard but elegant movements, "I can't let my daughter's confidence disappear." Zhang Feng secretly decided that no matter how much it cost, this needle, she fixed.
It has been more than half a year since the girl had taken the inhibition injection.
Zhang Feng pasted a height sticker by the bedroom door, from the end of the suppression needle to now, the girl will grow a little taller on average every month, sometimes invisible to the naked eye.
Watching the stickers painted with tall horizontal lines, the mother and daughter would cheer each other on.
Although her father was not very supportive at first, he saw that his daughter was slowly getting better, and he also took the initiative to quit sweets, and there was no ice cream and chocolate cake in the refrigerator at home, but milk and eggs instead.
The process of getting an injection is painful. The drug needs to be introduced from the abdomen subcutaneously into the body, the needle is three or four times thicker than the ordinary needle, the dosage is based on weight, and the girl needs to take 3.75mg of the drug every month.
In the second month of the anti-injection, Zhang Feng began to "double-hit", that is, to play the anti-injection and growth hormone at the same time, and the two injections together cost more than 10,000 yuan a month. More than half a year later, the inspection plus the round-trip travel expenses, medical expenses, Zhang Feng roughly calculated, there are nearly 100,000 yuan. According to the most ideal situation, it will cost about 200,000 yuan for two years.
Once the injection starts, it cannot be stopped, and it is necessary to report to the hospital regularly, which is a protracted battle.
Every time she went to the hospital, she had to do a levodopa excitation test, and Zhang Feng would hear her screams.
After the injection, the girl walked out of the hospital with her school bag on her back, "I want to look better when I dance ballet." ”
"Not all precocious children need injections"
On a network platform, under a post of a popular science suppression needle, there are hundreds of comments, all of which are entangled in whether they need to play the suppression needle.
"The female baby is currently 10 years old, the bone age is 11.9, the prediction can only grow to 158cm, and it is expected that the first menarche will come at the age of 10.9." Need an injection? "9 years and 9 months old girl, 154cm tall, 75 pounds, bone age 11 years old. The breasts are starting to develop, is it still necessary to fight? ”......
It's really a huge group.
From the beginning of giving injections to the girls, Zhang Feng joined some parent groups who received growth hormone injections and inhibitory injections. Zhang Feng found that there were so many parents like her, willing to spend hundreds of thousands of yuan to buy a height that was "not discriminated against".
"It takes five thousand pieces of powder a month, and if it is replaced by water, it will be even more unbearable." A parent complained in the group. Here, powder and water refer to growth hormone.
Parents cited the example of Messi growing to 170cm by playing growth hormone, but they did not know that Messi was diagnosed at the age of 11 as a dwarfism caused by lack of growth hormone.
"Parents don't really care about that. If the hospital does not let them fight, they will say in the group whether they can go to a private hospital to find a way. Zhang Feng said that she herself has received many calls from parents for consultation.
Zhang Feng told the parents one by one that the girl was not another reason, it was indeed diagnosed with central precocious puberty before the injection, everyone must listen to the doctor's diagnosis.
"If the doctor doesn't recommend it, where can I get this injection?" Chen Can, a parent of the Go class, asked Zhang Feng.
Zhang Feng remembered Chen Can and her child, Chen Can himself was not tall, and every time he came to pick up the child, he wore high heels and combed a high ponytail.
Zhang Feng didn't understand why the needle he repeatedly struggled with whether to get the injection had become a must-have in Chen Can's case.
"Later, I asked a few more questions, and she felt that she was not tall, dragging down the child, and did not want the child to suffer from height. She saw that some people said that needles can grow taller, and they had to try it. Zhang Feng said.
"Those parents are crazy, eating Chinese medicine, begging for home remedies everywhere, forcing children to drink milk, letting children touch high every day, and parents insist on pulling 300 legs for their children every day... There are all kinds of strange tricks. ”
For Zhang Feng, this is a helpless treatment for the right medicine, but for those short children, such an option may be risky. But the temptation to "grow tall" is too great, so great that many people can't see the cost they may face.
As an expert in children's growth and development, regarding injections and growth hormones that inhibit development, Wang Chunlin, director of the Department of Pediatrics of the First Hospital of Zhejiang University, suggested that parents should be cautious - "children with central precocious puberty may need to be injected with inhibition." He stressed.
"Girls' development is generally advanced, nearly 4% of girls start breast development at the age of 7; in the past three years, affected by the epidemic, children have less exercise and good nutrition, which will indeed cause some children to develop earlier." However, it is necessary to carry out targeted treatment according to their own situation and degree, and not all children with precocious puberty need injections. Wang Chunlin said.
Wang Chunlin, director of the Department of Pediatrics of the First Hospital of Zhejiang University, said hurriedly: "There are too many parents who are obsessed with this injection, and you media want to help us publicize it more, and many children really don't need to play." ”
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Children who do suffer from short stature can be treated with growth hormone
Growth hormone was born in 1956, and Raben, an endocrinologist in Boston, USA, isolated and purified growth hormone (hGH) from the human pituitary gland and applied it to the treatment of growth hormone deficiency (GHD).
In 1998, domestic growth hormone powder was listed, and in 2005, domestic water agent was listed, and the manufacturers were Kinsey Pharmaceutical, a subsidiary of Changchun High-tech.
In 2008, the Chinese Journal of Pediatrics published the "Guidelines for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Short-stature Children", which pointed out common side effects of growth hormone therapy, including hypothyroidism, changes in glucose metabolism, idiopathic benign intracranial pressure increase, antibody production, slippage of the femoral head, necrosis, injection of local redness or rash, and the possibility of tumor induction.
These costs are often hidden under the temptation of "growing tall", but in fact, are there really so many people who need to grow tall?
According to data from the People's Daily in 2014, the incidence of short stature in children on the mainland is about 3%, about 7 million children aged 4 to 15 need treatment, and less than 30,000 patients really receive reasonable treatment every year.
According to Xinhua News Agency, only a very small part of the real need for growth hormone therapy, the vast majority of children only need regular diet, exercise, sleep guidance. Children with normal growth hormone secretion cannot be injected, otherwise it will lead to problems such as endocrine system disorders.
Zhang Yining, director of the Department of Pediatric Endocrinology and Metabolism at The First Hospital of Jilin University, believes that drugs are used to treat diseases. It's not that you feel short, and you want to grow as tall as you want, just do some growth hormone, which is ridiculous.
Lin Ming of the Department of Pediatric Endocrinology of Wuhan Union Medical College Hospital believes that short-stature children must be examined for children's bone age and growth hormone secretion level to exclude various diseases before deciding whether it is suitable for growth hormone therapy. It is true that in children with short stature, growth hormone is currently considered the most effective treatment.
In the era of pluralism, the simple pursuit of tallness does not seem to be the whole value of life, in the pursuit of aesthetics, please do not ignore health.
Source | Qianjiang Evening News (Except for the doctors in the article, the interviewees are pseudonyms)
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