Abstract

Idiopathic short stature (ISS) is a kind of low height among children in which children's height is more than 2 standard deviation (SD) scores below the mean score of the height of other children with the same age and gender. It is one of the disorders that physicians use growth hormone for its treatment. Therefore, the purpose of the current study was to investigate the effect of growth hormone treatment on the adulthood height of children with ISS through meta- analysis method. In total 20 studies with a sample size of 1,517 were included in the meta-analysis through searching in external databases, including Web of science, Pubmed, Cochran, Medline, Embase, Springer, Scopus, and Science Direct using mesh keywords as growth hormone, final height, adult height, and idiopathic short stature. Mean score and SD were utilized for measuring any increase in height growth and random effect model was used for combining studies. Further, I-2 index was used for determining the heterogeneity of studies. Results indicated that before treatment, according to standard mean difference percentile of children's height was -1.64 (95 confidence interval (CI): -2.01 to -1.28) which is equal to 5. After treatment, according to standard mean difference percentile of children's height came out to be 0.11 (95 CI: 0.07 -0.14) which is equal to 54.38. This indicates that percentile of children's height has increased as a result of treatment with growth hormone. Through combining the results of all studies, the mean score for participants' height before treatment was 5 and after treatment it reached 54. Therefore, obtained mean difference for adult height after treatment with growth hormone was reported to be more than 1.4 SD score (about 7.6 cm). Growth hormone can be influential in increasing the adult height of children with ISS.