Treatment with a luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone agonist in adolescents with short stature.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Enzyme Inhibitors, published as a randomized controlled trial.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 18 boys taking part.

PubMed indexes the participants as children and teenagers, both men and women.

Fifty short adolescents (18 boys and 32 girls) with low predicted adult height (mean [+/-SD], 3.3+/-1.2 SD below the population mean) received either placebo (24 subjects) or an LHRH agonist (26 subjects).

Adult height was measured when bone age exceeded 16 years in girls and 17 years in boys and when the rate of growth was less than 1.5 cm per year.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study.

The boys were allocated by chance, so the Enzyme Inhibitors group and the comparison group should start out alike.

Neither the boys nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Enzyme Inhibitors, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

The comparison arm used a placebo, so changes seen with Enzyme Inhibitors could be set against what happens without it.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Body Height, Bone Density, Enzyme Inhibitors, Follicle Stimulating Hormone, Growth, Growth Disorders and Luteinizing Hormone.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Enzyme Inhibitors in 18 boys.

With fewer than 40 people, it is a small study, so it is better read as an early signal for further research than as a settled answer.

Results are reported in around 7 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2003 (The New England journal of medicine), a journal based in United States.

More context: all human trials.