Tall Boys Research Articles

Testosterone therapy in boys with tall stature

Eleven tall boys were treated with testosterone using a long acting testosterone preparation in a mean dosage of 532 ± 147 mg/m2/mo. Treatment was considered justified if predicted adult height was 195 cm or more. Mean duration of treatment was 2,1 years. Chronological age at start of treatment ranged from 8,5 to 16,1 years (×=12,62 ± 2,39), bone age ranged from 11,1 to 15,7 acc. to the TW II (RUS) method. Parent's height was ×=188,7 ± 8,52 for the fathers, and 175, 1 ± 6,43 for the mothers. Mean predicted adult height was acc. to Bayley-Pinneau 205,17 ± 12,02 cm and 206,92 ± 13,03 cm acc. to Tanner. All boys except two were in puberty when treatment was started and adults at the time of evaluation. On the basis of bone age (RUS TW II) at start of treatment, 3 groups were formed: group I: 3 boys with a bone age of 14 years (x=15,0). Mean height reduction amounted to 11,4 ± 6,9 cm for all boys together. Group I: 20,5 ± 3,0 cm; group II: 8,5±4,1 cm and group III: 5,3±1,5 cm. Hence it follows that the reduction is the greater the earlier therapy is started. Side effects were in general of minor degree. In 2 boys we had to discontinue the treatment (severe akne and psychic disturbances).

The Two Hunters

Xf The Two Hunters by Harriette Arnow He was a tall boy, slender, with small hands and small feet, a narrow thincheeked face, and hair the color of weather-bleached sandstone. His eyes were blue, now dark, now light; quiet, bottomless eyes that, like deep quiet water, covered and revealed and reflected many things. In one hand he carried a rifle, and carefully cradled in the crook of his other arm was his old felt hat, lined with moss and half filled with flowers. Now and then he looked below him toward the bottom of the narrow valley where a faint thread of pale blue smoke wavered up above the spruce trees, and from some hidden place behind the trees there came the thin sour smell of boiling mash. But most often he looked at the ground, and when he saw a sign of the thing he hunted, he would drop to his knees and search under the dead damp leaves, carefully, with slow gentle movements of his hands. The clay bank hound dog that followed at his heels would pause to watch, and then come to sniff the flowers the boy drew from under the leaves. He showed a sympathy each time the boy shook his head and said in his slow soft voice, "They're little, Mose. I wanted bigger onespinker like Millie likes." Many times he stopped for no reason at all, but was still, looking at the flowers in his hat, caressed them with his eyes, and there was a gentle dreaming in his glance that went to something past the flowers. 62 He was dreaming so with a half smile on his mouth when the dog pricked his ears, looked up the ridge side and growled low in his chest. The boy listened, too, and the listening concerned look on his face killed the wandering lights in his eyes, and they were cold and dark and quiet. He glanced toward the smoke, "It's somebody comin' where they've no business to come," he whispered to Mose, and turned up the hill. He walked more quickly now, the hat filled with flowers carried gently as before , the gun held high and clear of the laurel bush. He walked soundlessly, careful to twist his shoulders and slide through the brush, his eyes on the ground as if he would pick a place for his feet, and when the feet came down they never snapped a twig or ground against a stone, but rested lightly and silently against the dead leaves and the damp earth, then lifted again and swung away in the long unhurried stride of the born hill man. He went up the steep moss covered ground, through clusters of dark green ivy and laurel bush until he came to the open growth of the ridge top. There the pines were straight and dark and tall with little undergrowth between except the coarse ridge grass, greening at its roots in sign of the coming spring. He stood by a tree and listened again, then looked at the listening Mose and nodded slowly. He looked toward the white sand of the ridge road that lay pale and straight and dead between the black pine trunks, and he and the dog drew nearer the road, not walking openly through the grass, but flitting quickly from tree to tree. There was a curious oneness about the boy and dog as if they were no longer two things, separate and different, but one, some strange, machine -like thing, planned for watching and listening and slipping through the trees. They came at last to a tree by the road, and the boy placed the flowers in a cup-like hollow formed by the roots of the tree, and stood with both hands on his gun and watched the road. The road had the old, never-used look of something lost and forgotten so long ago that it was less a place for people to pass over than the memory of a road. On it there were no wagon tracks or signs of the feet of men or of animals. Dead grass like a carpet was brown in the center and...

Testosterone treatment of excessively tall boys

Twenty-nine tall boys with a mean height prediction of 198 cm were treated for serious psychosocial reasons with high doses of a long-acting testosterone preparation (500 mg/m2/month). Their ages at the start of treatment ranged from 9.8 to 16.9 years, and the mean duration of treatment was 1.2 years. Bone age was assessed according to the Tanner-Whitehouse II (RUS) method, and height predictions were calculated using the age-specific regression equations of Tanner and colleagues. On the basis of bone age at the start of treatment, three groups were formed (bone age 12.1 to 14, 14.1 to 15, and greater than 15 years), and the results were assessed separately. In the whole series, adult height was reduced by 5.4 cm; the best results (8cm) were achieved in the youngest bone age group. Under treatment, bone maturation was accelerated (1.8 years per year) and growth velocity increased (youngest bone age group) or was normal (older bone age groups). Testicular volume remained prepubertal in young patients and decreased in older ones. After discontinuation of treatment, testicular volume and sperm count became normal again after a mean period of 1.5 years, but in a few cases recovery was slower. It is concluded that adult height in tall boys may be effectively reduced by testosterone, that the results are best if treatment is started in early puberty, and that the suppressing effects on pituitary and testicular function are fully reversible. Since the indication for treatment is a psychosocial one, the patients should be carefully selected, taking into account not only growth but also psychological and familial factors.

The child with "excessive" height prediction. Clinical dilemma.

Elsewhere in this issue (see page 95), Ruvalcaba et al report the use of androgen therapy as a pharmacological approach to the problem of the unusually tall boy. This case study exemplifies a clinical dilemma for us all to contemplate—the tall girl or boy whose height prediction is unacceptable either to the child or the parents, and who request(s) pharmacological intervention by the physician to cause earlier epiphyseal fusion. Thus the physician is caught between the upper and nether millstones: the easiest path is to accede to the intense pressures put on him by the family to something, but then he must live with the uncertainty that the therapy he has used may eventually do harm to the patient. The physician's fears about the long-term uncertainties of estrogen or androgen therapy in otherwise healthy girls or boys may be difficult to communicate to the parent or child whose attention

XYY chromosome complement in a patient with nodulocystic acne.

A 14-year-old, very tall boy with severe nodulocystic acne was found to have the XYY chromosome complement, thus supporting previous studies suggesting an association between this dermatological lesion and the presence of an extra Y chromosome. It is conceivable that Y-controlled genes, regulating pilosebaceous cell function directly or through the production of an aberrant testosterone, are implicated in the pathogenesis of nodulocystic acne. Severe nodulocystic acne, especially early in life, may prove to be another phenotypic trait of the XYY syndrome.

Can Aptitude for German Be Predicted?

Most teachers would be glad to know at the beginning of the year what grades the students seated in front of them were going to get at the end. That tall boy: will he be my brightest student, or a troublemaking failure? Which of these kids, whose names I don't yet know by heart (though I soon will), will be the good learners who make my year worthwhile? Which the depressing laggards? If teachers knew these things, they could take steps accordingly: prepare enrichment for the best students and remedial work for the poorest, perhaps exchange some students with another teacher. They could avoid some of the discouragement and frustration that misplaced students inevitably cause. The way classes are chosen at present, by accidental assignment, the teacher doesn't find out about his students until too much of the school year has passed for any changes to be made. Is it utopian to think we can know, before he starts, how well a student will learn German? Yes, it is unrealistic to expect to know precisely what grade each student will get a year hence. But it is quite within reason to expect some clues, like this student will probably be good, that one probably fair, and that one probably poor. There is a test which does this. Here is how it was used in three schools during the 1965-66 school year.1 At the beginning of the school year, the Pimsleur Language Aptitude Battery was given to all ninth graders about to begin German: 122 of them. The aptitude scores were not disclosed to the teachers, who proceeded to teach first-year German as they normally do. At the end of the year, the final grades were collected. The point was to match the aptitude scores against the final grades. Of the 122 students who started, 113 were left at the end; their aptitude scores and final grades are shown in Table 1. How well did the aptitude test predict the students' final grades? The table shows that the students who got the highest aptitude scores (stanine 9, 8, and 7) also got high grades in German; mainly A's and B's. Those who got the lowest aptitude scores (stanine 1, 2, and 3) got poor or failing grades in German; there were no A's among them, and only one B. The middle aptitude

Alexander Tcherepnin Septuagenarian

Sasha Tcherepnin, a tall boy for his age, was a familiar figure at the St. Petersburg Conservatory fifty-odd years ago, as he was seen walking down the corridors accompanied by his father Nicolas Tcherepnin, professor of composition and conducting, teacher of a generation of Russian composers, and himself a composer of stature. Paradoxically, it was Sasha's mother, not his father, who gave him his first music lessons. As soon as he learned to manipulate the piano keys, he began making up tunes of his own. There was so much music lying around the house that he picked up the rudiments of notation intuitively. He learned notes and the Russian alphabet at the same time. Now, at seventy, he cannot even remember when he could not read Russian words or musical notes.