[Short stature of children suffering from certain chronic diseases]

Weakening of a child s growth potential is often observed in the case of chronic illness.

The paper aimed at the assessment of growth disorders in children and young people suffering from chronic sensory organ disease i.e. vision and hearing disease and children suffering from cystic fibrosis.

The anthropometric data (height, body weight, body weight index BMI) and the medical history data constitute the material of the paper. The medical history data regarded an extent of the child s defect intensification, disease etiology and past curative therapies. Due to the different age of the subjects, the individual measurement data were standardized as an arithmetic mean and standard deviation of a relevant age class and sex of a reference system, and the data were constituted by the anthropometric measurements of the children and young people in Warsaw. Those children were considered to be short-statured ones whose body height values were below -2 of the standard deviation relative to the mean.

Among the children with vision deficiency, serious growth disorders were noticed in 32 subjects (11.1%), whose vision defect resulted from, but was not limited to, retinopathy in premature infants, intracranial neoplasm, and head injuries. In the group of children with hearing deficiency, serious growth disorders were observed in 19 subjects (10.2%), whose hearing defect resulted from, but was not limited to, receiving antibiotics and other ototoxic drugs, catching a rubella virus by a mother during her pregnancy, cerebrospinal meningitis, and mother s liver or kidney disease. Among the children suffering from cystic fibrosis, short stature was noticed in 16 subjects (25.8%). In this group, the patients with the hardest mutation type i.e. Delta508/Delta508 dominated. In all short-statured children, big body weight deficiency was also observed and the biggest deficiency was noticed in children with cystic fibrosis and children with vision deficiency.

It is sometimes difficult to determine unambiguously to what extent weakening of the growth potential results from the activity of the disease factor itself or from the treatment method applied.