Growth Hormone - how early did you start?

mandr

Tue, Dec 12 2023, 12:29 am

My 2.5 year old son has idiopathic short stature. He has always been small (born 4lbs at full term) and at first the pediatrician kept telling me to feed more and increase calories etc but as any mother of a child with ISS knows, it makes no difference! Fast forward a few months and we took him to a top endocrinologist who deals specifically with short stature issues and she ran all sorts of testing on him and had their geneticist run even more tests. BH nothing stood out with the testing and the dr is treating him as having ISS. She said she'll start him on GH treatment once he turns 2 because every year we can cash in on growth, the better it is.

So we finally got the meds and all that and I started giving him the Omnitrope. I am worried that if he CH'V has side effects, I wouldn't know about it (he's a little delayed with talking). Like how would I know if he has a headache or pain or something. The only people I know on GH are kids who are old enough to express these things. Are side effects that common?

Also, please post if your child took GH starting at a young age. It will give me chizzuk since it's such a long road ahead. Like a decade plus! Thank you!

amother

DarkMagenta

Tue, Dec 12 2023, 12:41 am

My daughter was born at 3.5 pounds. She was very short for a while. Now at 10 she’s average. Why did you feel you need to start so early? My other child is on growth hormones for deficiency but is a preteen. I didn’t even consider it so young.

mandr

Tue, Dec 12 2023, 1:07 am

amother DarkMagenta wrote:

I don’t want to wait until he’s older and then see what’s going on. By then it’s kind of too late to get full benefit. Some kids do catch up but many don’t if they haven’t already by age 2. My son has been consistently small and never got closer to the curve. We are a tall family too except for my mother in law and she’s very short today, so this is an anomaly. If he was a girl then I might have thought differently.