Letters to the editor
 | Non-familial short stature |
| Professor Cole comments: |
Non-familial short stature
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
EDITOR,
Cole's proposed new chart1
would indeed detect children with non-familial short stature. Whether
it would detect "hidden" pathology is less certaindata from the
Wessex Growth Study suggests not. Routine investigation of all children
below Tanner's 3rd centile identified eight cases of silent
pathology.2 Three of these, already on or above the
current 0.4th centile, would clearly have lain above it on a
conditional chart (figure 1), and might easily have been dismissed as
normal. Parental heights may well inform the specialist, but their
usefulness in a screening programme, without a full family history, is
debatable.
| Figure Removed (Available Only in the Full Text) |
Conditional standards demand that all heights are measured, not estimated, and should exclude those of abnormal stature.3 Such conditions rarely hold. Few fathers, as we found, attend school medicals. In any case, by school entry, one in four Wessex children lived in single parent or reconstituted families.
Furthermore, almost half
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