What are the treatments for precocious puberty?

Doctor of medicine, graduated from Fudan University, mainly engaged in the research of children's endocrine and precocious puberty, and has rich clinical experience.

Kong Yuanyuan: There are many treatments. Different treatments can be adopted according to the severity and classification of children's diseases. At present, gonadotropin-releasing hormone is the most effective drug to treat true precocious puberty. This drug can down-regulate the GnRh receptor on the surface of gonadotropin-releasing hormone cells, so that its sex hormone secretion and biological activity are reduced, which is the most effective. But this medicine is mostly used for heavier children, and it is only used when puberty reaches the fourth or fifth stage, or when menstruation comes.

Another drug, progesterone derivative, can repeatedly inhibit the pituitary gland from producing sex hormones and delay the onset of menstruation, but it has little effect on delaying bone growth and development.

There is also a kind of Chinese medicine treatment. From the dialectical theory of Chinese medicine, they think that the disease hormone of precocious puberty is kidney yin deficiency and fire flourishing. The so-called kidney in TCM mainly refers not to the kidney in modern medicine, but to the neuroendocrine regulation system of the body, including the hypothalamic pituitary gland axis, which means that these regulation axes are activated in advance and appear hyperactive. Children have different degrees of symptoms of yin deficiency and excessive fire, so children can be given traditional Chinese medicine for nourishing yin and purging fire. Now some hospitals have homemade Chinese medicine.

The other is growth hormone. Children treated with gonadotropin-releasing hormone have delayed bone fusion, which will undoubtedly win valuable time for their height growth and help to improve their final height, but the application of these drugs will also slow down the peak speed of height growth. You can extend your height growth time, but this speed may slow down. In this case, sometimes treated with growth hormone, the time will be lengthened without slowing down, and the genetic potential of the whole height will be fully exerted.

The other is to supplement some calcium and vitamin D to children with low bone density. In addition, for the treatment of some secondary precocious puberty and pseudo precocious puberty, such as tumors or primary diseases, the incidence of true precocious puberty caused by tumors in the central nervous system of boys is much higher than that of girls, so we must pay attention to boys.