Child Growth : Hormone Speciality Lab

Human growth hormone (GH) the growth of your body. It is made by the pituitary gland which is located at the base of the brain. It is responsible to help children grow taller (linear growth), increases muscle mass, and decreases body fat. Additionally, it helps in controlling the body's metabolism.

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This can be answered by comparing your child’s height to the height of other children who are the same age and sex. This comparison is done with help of standard charts that are available with your doctor. It is advisable to use Indian growth charts for our children. If your child is much shorter than other children of the same age and sex, doctors call it “short stature.”

Not essentially. Children who are short may be healthy and may not have any medical problem. Reasons for short stature in these children can be:
1. One or both of their parents are short. If a child’s parents are short, chances are good that he or she will be short, too.
2. They are growing more slowly than usual i.e. they have “growth delay.” These children are short because they have their growth spurt delayed than other children. But these children will grow to a normal height as adults.
Some children who are short do have a medical problem. Some of these include:
1. Very low body weight
2. Long-term diseases affecting the digestive system, heart, lungs, kidneys, or blood.
3.“Growth-hormone deficiency”. Growth hormone is a hormone made in the pituitary gland in brain that helps children grow normally. Children with this condition have too little growth hormone in their body to have normal physical growth.
4. Other hormonal diseases like thyroid problem, pituitary abnormality etc.
5. Problems that babies are born with, for example abnormal genes