Clinical evaluation of children with complaint of short stature

Short stature is a common cause of referral to pediatric endocrinology clinics. The aim of this study was to investigate the clinical features of children with short stature. A total of 3166 children admitted to the pediatric endocrinology outpatient clinic with the complaint of short stature between 01.06.2013 and 01.06.2017 were evaluated. The complaint of short stature was approximately one-quarter of all applications. The study group consisted of 1241 (39.1%) children who had a standard deviation score (SDS) ≤ -2 and / or had decreased below -2 SDS at follow-up. The patients were grouped according to their clinical, anthropometric, radiological and laboratory findings. The mean age of 1241 children with 684 boys was 9.9 ± 4.8 years. The mean height SDS of the patients was -2.78 ± 0.74, the mean weight SDS was -2.30±1.15, and the mean body mass index (BMI) SDS was -0.87 ± 1.36. Below -2 BMI SDS consisted of 18.1% of the children scanned with short stature. While the frequency of normal-variant short stature was 29.9% (n: 367), the most causes of short stature due to organic cause are isolated malnutrition 21.0% (n: 262) and the endocrine diseases 12.6% (n: 158). The frequent of idiopathic short stature was 5.3% (n = 66), short stature due to chronic diseases 4.0% (n: 50), syndromic diseases with a genetic and / or clinically determined syndrome 2.3% (n: 28). Tissue transglutaminase Ig A positivity was detected in 2.3% of children, while the rate of celiac diagnosis was 1.6% after endoscopic biopsy. The rate of pathological diagnosis was 85.3% in 340 (27.4%) children with severe short stature (height SDS ≤ 3). In conclusion, this study showed that there was no short stature in the majority children who admitted due to complaint of short stature in our pediatric endocrinology outpatient clinic, and only one third of the children with short stature were short stature. Isolated malnutrition and endocrine diseases were the most common causes of pathological short stature. Keywords: child endocrinology, short stature, malnutrition