Original articleGrowth hormone improves height in patients with juvenile idiopathic arthritis: 4-year data of a controlled study☆
Section snippets
Patient population and study protocol
Prepubertal children (n = 46) with severe systemic or nonsystemic polyarticular JIA and growth retardation were enrolled within 10 months, fulfilling the International League of Associations of Rheumatologists classification criteria.6 All children had a SD score for height of −2.0 or below, a height velocity below the 25th percentile during the year before the beginning of treatment, or both. At study start, all patients were prepubertal. They had been treated with glucocorticoids on a relative
Patients
Thirty-eight patients were suitable for evaluation (Fig 1). Their characteristics during the study period are shown in Table I.
At start, there was no statistical difference between the groups regarding classification of JIA, age at onset of JIA, duration of illness, daily glucocorticoid dose, cumulative prednisolone dose, age, BA, and GVSDs. Patients of the control group were significantly taller than the patients of the treated group, and there were more girls in the control group. None of the
Discussion
This study shows that GH treatment in JIA led to a continuous catch-up growth over a period of 4 years, resulting in a net height gain of 1.0 SDs. This may translate into an increased final height. The beneficial effect of long-term GH therapy was even more impressive when compared with the control group, consisting of children with similar medical characteristics but initially somewhat taller stature. It could be speculated that the GH-treated children would have had a much poorer outcome
Acknowledgements
We thank Dr Gerlinde Lang and Dr H. Steinkamp, Pharmacia, Erlangen, Germany, for their support.
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Supported by Pharmacia, Erlangen, Germany.