Using growth hormone to make short kids taller isn't the first time medicine has sought to manipulate the height of healthy children.
Estrogen treatment to halt female growth -- recently in the news because of a report about a Seattle family using medical interventions to stop the growth of their severely disabled daughter -- was used for decades beginning in the 1950s to slow the growth of healthy girls.
The recent controversial report centers on a girl known publicly only as Ashley and as the "pillow angel" -- her parents' name for her. The 9-year-old, treated at Seattle Children's Hospital, has been given estrogen therapy with the expectation that treatment will halt her growth at about 4 feet, 5 inches. Her parents say they made the decision to stop her growth so that the child, who cannot sit up, feed herself or speak, can remain at home with them through adulthood. They feared that if she grew taller and bigger they could no longer manage her care.
But at the midpoint of the 20th century, with nary a whimper of protest, girls with no medical problems were taken to doctors' offices seeking a pharmaceutical solution to the problem of getting too tall.
Back then, girls who appeared on a path to reaching 5 feet 10 inches or more -- a height their parents feared would render them unmarriageable -- were sometimes treated with high doses of estrogen. That was when homemaker and mother were the most popular and available career choices for women, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was urging young women to marry early and have children "to fight the twin enemies of freedom -- crime and Communism."
The hormone is responsible for hastening the fusion of growth plates of long bones during puberty, which is why the onset of menstruation signals a significant slow-down in growth in girls. Doses of estrogen could hurry that process along.
"There are some parallels with today's growth hormone technology," says Joyce Lee, a professor of pediatric endocrinology at the University of Michigan. She wrote a historical overview of estrogen treatment for tall girls in the October 2006 issue of Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine.
"Now we can use technology to augment height in boys," she says. "Estrogen was thought to reduce height by 1 to 2 inches. Growth hormone is thought to increase height by 1 to 2 inches."
