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Approximately 15 million babies are born preterm across the world every year, with less than 37 completed weeks of gestation. Survival rates increased during the last decades with the improvement of neonatal care. With premature birth, babies are deprived of the intense intrauterine growth phase, and postnatal growth failure might occur. Some children born prematurely will remain short at later ages and adult life. The risk of short stature increases if the child is also born small for gestational age. In this review, the effects of being born preterm on childhood growth and adult height and the hormonal abnormalities possibly associated with growth restriction are discussed, followed by a review of current information on growth hormone treatment for those who remain with short stature during infancy and childhood.

Congenital hypothyroidism (CH) is the most common congenital endocrine disorder. The early treatment of CH patients has successfully improved the prognosis and management of this disorder. Optimal treatment and management throughout the patient's life, beginning in the neonatal period, are required to ensure long-term health. Affected patients should be offered assessments of associated medical conditions and provided with accurate information about their condition throughout their lives, but particularly during the transition from pediatric to adult services. This review provides a summary of current knowledge about the long-term outcomes of these patients and appropriate management into early adulthood. We carried out a systematic search of the Medline database to identify relevant articles. Despite major improvements in prognosis, the impact of CH is clearly not uniform, and management should take into account a broader range of relevant indicators, including CH severity, associated comorbid conditions and the adequacy of treatment during childhood and adulthood. The early diagnosis and management of associated medical conditions, and better educational strategies to improve compliance with treatment, should improve the long-term prognosis. Further studies are required to explore changes with aging.

Background: Congenital hyperinsulinism (CH) is treated surgically in many centers (near-total and partial pancreatectomy for diffuse and focal disease respectively). Most patients treated with near-total pancreatectomy developed diabetes during childhood/puberty. CH patients are at increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders, some being severe, which are reported to occur in 14–44% of patients from highly heterogenous cohorts. Over the last few decades, we have treated children with CH conservatively without surgery. The aim of this study was to assess the neurodevelopmental outcome of these patients.

Design and methods: The study included 21 Ashkenazi CH medically treated patients: 11 homozygotes (diffuse disease) and 9 heterozygotes with mutations on the paternal allele (presumed focal disease). The mean age was 13.7 years (range 8–23). Neurodevelopmental outcomes were assessed by telephone interviews of parents, using a standard questionnaire. Closest age siblings of CH patients served as controls.

Results: Ten CH patients had perinatal seizures of short duration. Four had post-neonatal seizures, which remitted entirely. During early childhood, four patients (19%) had hypotonia, eight (38%) had fine motor problems, seven (33%) had gross motor problems (clumsiness), and one had mild cerebral palsy. Three patients (14%) had speech problems. Eight patients required developmental therapy, compared to one in the control group. Most of these problems were resolved by age 4–5 years. At school age, all were enrolled in regular education, some excelled in their studies, 6 out of 21 patients (29%) had learning problems (2 out of 21 controls). None had overt diabetes.

Conclusions: Good neurodevelopmental outcome was observed in our conservatively treated CH patients, with no diabetes as reported in patients undergoing pancreatectomy.

This is a brief review of the normal changes in adolescent behaviour and the interplay between biology and social factors that occur at and around puberty, in an attempt to explain when this transition may become problematic The onset of puberty is a biological marker for an individual's transition from a non-reproductive to a reproductive state. Adolescence is a normal developmental transition associated with clearly visible physical changes, reorganization and pruning of neuronal circuits in the brain and the occurrence of new behaviours and interests. It is a time when new life tasks (orientation towards peers of the other sex, romantic and sexual involvement and mastering an educational career) need to be mastered. Parent-child conflict increases and becomes more intense as the adolescent struggles for more independence while still requiring support. These normal changes can become problematic if biological and social expectations diverge e.g. entering puberty very early or very late. While early pubertal onset in boys is likely to have beneficial effects, in girls precocious pubertal timing may have a negative impact on body-image, affect (or emotional well-being) and sex-role expectations. Other individual biological predispositions and genetic endowment may interact with social factors (e.g. peers, parenting style, neighbourhood) making adolescence either an adaptive or a challenging transition. There is a lack of sufficiently large longitudinal studies that have been able to study this interaction between genetics, biology and social environment on adolescent development. The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) cohort provides a unique opportunity to investigate the impact of pubertal timing on social behaviour. Planned assessments and concepts are outlined.