Could growth hormones theoretically be administered to any infant of normal height to make them taller than average? Why or why not?
In: Biology
Nope, that’s not how it works.
Growth hormones cause things to grow faster, not larger. Your genes encode parameters that mostly set your maximum height. You have to get enough food and exercise to achieve that, and growing faster makes it even harder to meet the nutrition and exercise parameters.
Once your growth plates fuze you are done growing and this is determined by genetics, not hormones. At that point HGH would just make you enter puberty faster
There have been studies showing that children who are clinically short and who were given HGH grew up to 4” taller than a control group, but still remained shorter than average.
Gigantism is caused by a pituitary gland over-secreting growth hormone, so there is a correlation between growth hormone and height.
As far as giving an infant HGH, I imagine the child would grow up to be taller, especially if the doses were continued throughout its childhood and were of significant potency.
Of course, there haven’t really been studies on that since it’s not medically ethical to just shoot up babies with growth hormone to see what happens.
Never going to be studied in a controlled trial as it would be giving experimental drugs to healthy infants.
There’s little evidence that growth hormone amounts on their own do much once at a level one needs to grow. Children have a natural healthy range of 10-50 ng/ml, five times.
It’s not advantageous to be taller than average in a health sense. You’re more susceptible to arthritis, cancer, heart disease, etc, because your body is bigger and heavier, similar to the effects of being overweight. People just don’t talk about it because you can’t really control height and it’s traditionally seen as better to be taller.
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