Pattern and Frequency of Short Stature in Albanian Children.

Introduction: Short stature is defined as a standing height more than 2 standard deviations (SDs) below the mean for age and sex. While there are many medical causes for being short and having poor growth, including growth hormone deficiency, hypothyroidism, Turner syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease, kidney problems, malnutrition, etc., most children who are short are normal.

Objectives: The identification and analysis of causes and factors leading to short stature in Albanian children.

Patients & Methods: Subjects enrolled in our study were admission with "Short stature" or "Slow growth velocity" from January 2001 to January 2011 and met the criteria: length < -2 z- score and/or height velocity <-2 z- score for age and sex. They were evaluated by anthropometric measurements; biochemical panel; hormonal balance; radiological studies; and hormonal provocative tests. Statistical processing was done with Epi-Info CDC 2000 and SPSS accordingly.

Results: The age of the 564 children was from 0.65-18.74 years (11.08 ± 3.28 years).

M / F: 221/343 (39% /61%) respectively. The frequency of diagnoses resulted as follows: the "constitutional short stature" 211children (37.4%), "GH deficit" 155(27.5%), "genetic syndrome" 67(11.9%), "familiar short stature" 38(6.7%), "others pathology" 38(6.7%), "idiopathic short stature" 31(5.5%), "i-uterine short stature" 16(2.8%).

Conclusions: The fact that 46% of the explored children resulted positive in terms of a pathology that had caused primary or secondary growth failure, makes it necessity careful monitoring of growth and reference of the children to a specialist as fast as possible. Evidently great age of exploration indicates a weak surveillance on growth monitoring in Albania.

Recommendations: Assessment of the child's growth must be a routine procedure. The early identification of stature growth delay will significantly increase the early detection of any pathology.