Total pubertal growth and markers of puberty onset in adolescents with GHD: comparison between mathematical growth analysis and pubertal staging methods.

Unlabelled: Two methods of determining puberty onset (Preece- Baines model 1 (PB1) and Tanner staging) were used to calculate total pubertal growth (TPG) in adolescents with growth hormone deficiency (GHD).

Patients And Methods: 34 patients (11 girls) met the following inclusion criteria: isolated GHD, >2 years growth hormone therapy prior to puberty onset, regular weight-adjusted GH dosage, known final height (age >21 years or height velocity <0.5 cm/year), no induction of puberty.

On the independence of adult stature from the timing of the adolescent growth spurt.

Longitudinal studies have shown repeatedly that little or no correlation exists between the timing of the pubertal spurt in stature and adult stature (AS). However, the possibility seems to have been overlooked that such near-zero correlations may, at least theoretically, be an artefact resulting from two opposite tendencies that cancel each other out: a hypothetical "biological" tendency for early maturers to end up as slightly shorter adults and a socially induced tendency, resulting from the existence of social gradients in growth, for accelerated maturation to be accompanied by taller A.S.

Application of growth models in the analysis of pathological growth data: The case of hypophosphatemic vitamin D-resistant rickets.

Growth in height of 16 patients suffering from hypophosphatemic vitamin D-resistant rickets (HR) was analyzed by means of three nonlinear growth models: the Preece Baines function, the JPPS model, and the triple logistic function. The data were purely longitudinal, covering age ranges from childhood to adulthood, with an average of 3 measurements per year. All three models proved to fit the growth pattern of HR patients with the same degree of accuracy as they do for healthy children, indicating that, despite their small height-for-age and their disproportionately short stature, these patients had a quite normal overall shape of their growth pattern.