Clinical Application of Bone Age Readings
An advanced or delayed bone age does not always indicate disease or "pathologic" growth. Conversely, the bone age may be normal in some conditions of abnormal growth. Children do not mature at exactly the same time. Just as there is wide variation among the normal population in age of losing teeth or experiencing the first menstrual period, the bone age of a healthy child may be a year or two advanced or delayed.
An advanced bone age is common when a child has had prolonged elevation of sex steroid levels, as in precocious puberty or congenital adrenal hyperplasia. The bone age is often marginally advanced with premature adrenarche, when a child is overweight from a young age or when a child has lipodystrophy. Bone age may be significantly advanced in genetic overgrowth syndromes, such as Sotos syndrome, Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome and Marshall-Smith syndrome.
Bone maturation is delayed with the variation of normal development termed Constitutional growth delay, but delay also accompanies growth failure due to growth hormone deficiency and hypothyroidism.
Read more about this topic: Bone Age
Famous quotes containing the words application, bone, age and/or readings:
“The human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this.”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“Two wooden tubs of blue hydrangeas stand at the foot of the stone steps.
The sky is a blue gum streaked with rose. The trees are black.
The grackles crack their throats of bone in the smooth air.
Moisture and heat have swollen the garden into a slum of bloom.
Pardie! Summer is like a fat beast, sleepy in mildew....”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now,
was and is, to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature: to show
virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and
body of the time his form and pressure.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The eating of a MacDonald’s meal is like the reading of Reader’s Digest—small, easily digested, carefully processed, carefully cut down, abridged. Reader’s Digest gives us knowledge that is easily compartmentalized, simplified, ideologically sound.”
—Clive Bloom, British educator. “MacDonald’s Man Meets Reader’s Digest,” Readings in Popular Culture: Trivial Pursuits?, St. Martin’s Press (1990)