Prepubertal gigantism in a girl with a hypophyseal tumor

Abstract

Monitoring the normal growth of a child is one of the primary tasks of a pediatric endocrinologist. The most common abnormality of growth is a variety of options for its delay, detected in 3% of children. Much less often, the reason for a visit to the doctor is tallness. The most adverse cause of gigantism in children for health and life is conditions accompanied by hyperproduction of growth hormone (GH). In pediatric practice, the latter, admittedly, constitute an endocrine rarity. Thus, according to 11-year observations of more than 800 children at the Outpatient Center for Pediatric Endocrinology at North Shore University Hospital in the United States, in the structure of the growth pathology, the height rate was 2.5% - approximately 75 cases per 100,000 children. At the same time, for each case of seeking advice about excessive growth, there were about 40 appeals due to its delay. True gigantism is found only in every 5th child with unusually high growth, or less than 0.5% among children with deviations in body length. On the other hand, according to M. I. Balabolkin, only 9% of patients with acromegaly debut of the disease occurs at the age of 20. These statistics once again emphasize the extreme rarity of diseases occurring with abnormal excess growth in childhood.