Estrogen
Therapy for Tall Teens Linked to Fertility Problems
21st
October 2004
Girls who took it
during adolescence had more trouble conceiving
later, study found
Tall girls who
receive estrogen therapy during adolescence to
reduce their adult height are more likely to have
fertility problems later in life.
That's the conclusion of an Australian study in
this week's issue of The Lancet.
This form of treatment has been available since
the 1950s. Estrogen therapy alters the development
of the long bones in adolescents and can reduce
adult height by 2 centimeters to 10 centimeters.
The study researchers examined fertility
information from 780 women. Half of them had
received estrogen therapy during adolescence and
half did not.
The study found that women who received estrogen
therapy were 80 percent more likely than those in
the control group to have tried for a year or more
to become pregnant without success. The women in
the estrogen group were also 80 percent more
likely to have seen a doctor because they were
having difficulty getting pregnant, and were twice
as likely to have taken fertility drugs, the
researchers said.
"Although the possibility of adverse reproductive effects
of estrogen treatment for tall stature in girls
has been acknowledged for many years, we believe
ours is the first study to report long-term
follow-up of the reproductive experiences of a
large cohort of treated girls," lead investigator
Alison Venn, of the University of Tasmania, said
in a prepared statement.
"Our findings indicate that exposure to high-dose
estrogens in adolescence is associated with
impaired fertility in later life. This effect was
seen as both a reduced per cycle rate of
conception in those who conceived, and as an
increase in the risk of experiencing infertility.
The availability of infertility treatments is
likely to have contributed to the finding that
women who were treated for tall stature had only a
small decrease in the probability of eventually
conceiving and having a live birth compared with
untreated women," Venn said.
More information
The Nemours Foundation has more about teen growth.
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