Noura M El Bakry* and Zamzam H Mohamed
Background: If a child's height is further more two standard deviations under the mean for children of his or her sex also age, then we say that he or she has short stature.
Quality of life (QOL) is a person's perception of their own state of well-being & functioning over a wide spectrum from the best possible to the worst possible. It involves psychological, physical, cognitive, social, functional & behavioral elements. QOL has also become more important in health care practice and research.
Objectives: to assess the QOL in children previously both idiopathic short stature (ISS) and growth hormone deficiency (GHD) were on the list of diagnoses in addition children on treatment with growth hormone (GH) by daily injection.
Methods: This cross-sectional study involved 200 children between the ages of 8 and 18 who were diagnosed to have GHD and ISS and were on treatment by GH daily injection at the Pediatric Endocrinology Unit at Minia University Hospital from March 2020 until October 2021.
Results: 16% of cases were ISS, and 84% of cases had GHD. Ninety-two percent of our studied cases were already on treatment with recombinant growth hormone (rGH). Children with ISS had significantly reduced physical, psychological, & environmental quality of life. Most affected is the social domain. Comparing treated and untreated groups, there is more emotional affection in the untreated group than the treated group (p less than 0.01).
An evaluation of the various sex classes (boys & girls) in respect to several domains amongst persons was made, but no statistically significant distinction was found.
Conclusions: QOL was impaired in cases of short stature, whether on GH theraphy or not. However, our study showed a significant correlation between PedsQL scores for short stature and age if the first administration of treatment donating early GH therapy had better QOL scores.
