Groan.

[pantryslut]

News of the day: Australian researchers confirm that adolescent girls given estrogen treatments to slow down their growth -- because tall girls are at a "social disadvantage" -- turn out to have fertility problems later in life.

Duh.

Here's a representative story. The really maddening thing, though, is that it takes a bit of hunting through the various reports to learn that the technique was only marginally effective in the first place. Two centimeters of height traded for what?

Next I want a study on whether or not such treatments increase the likelihood of osteoporosis.

Comments

[wookiepocket.livejournal.com]

what is the percentage of girls from this group who have Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome? oddly enough, many women aren't told by their doctors that they have it. it's fascinating!

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

That's a good question, actually.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

How sad. I've read about hormone treatments (different hormones) for trying to make short boys taller, and the concerns are very similar. How much of the individual's health can it be worth sacrificing to compensate for society's problems/bigotry around body image? Does that change when we're talking about uncertain future risk, rather than clearly recognizable current damage?

You mention that the news story barely mentions the marginal benefit of the hormone treatments. I found something even more remarkable. When they started doing these estrogen treatments in the 1950s, my mother was a tall teenager, and she says it was just horrible to be a tall girl. A tall girl couldn't buy clothes that fit, unless she were very rich. (My mother started sewing her own clothes when she was 12. She stopped in the 1980s, when department stores started to offer "tall" sizes for an extra $5 or $10.) She couldn't go out with a boy who was shorter than she was, or the ordinary background teasing that went with being tall would turn viciously aggressive. Back then, a teenaged girl could make herself noticable in a only a handful of socially acceptable ways...and unusual height wasn't really compatible with any of them.

The news story didn't mention that today's tall teenaged girls don't have the same disadvantages my mother did. There are so many more of them, the stores have to make clothes for them all. They play sports, they climb mountains, they do various kinds of performance. The world has changed enough to make room for a tall girl who wants to stand out from the crowd, as well as changing enough so that just being tall isn't enough to make a girl stand out from a mixed crowd of teenagers.
Depending how you count, it took a generation or two. How can we make it work faster, without needing the physical evolution?

[innerdoggie.livejournal.com]

That was a surprising article, since I thought that everybody *wants* to be tall these days. If our standard of beauty is the fashion model, they are all at least 5'10" (I'm too lazy to translate that into cm, so bear with me.)

I was a tall child, but Mother Nature stunted my growth with
those aforementioned high doses of estrogens, and I am (at most) average height.

I had forgotten that being tall was considered bad for women back in the 1950s.

[thette.livejournal.com]

I want a good, long-term study of cancer and heart disease risks in post-op transsexuals. (Both FTM and MTF, please.)

[trick.livejournal.com]

i wonder about endometriosis.

have you read the sunscreen articles as well? a number of recent studies have been finding the synthetic sunscreens can mimic hormones...so much so that they appear to be causing endomitriosis and cancer...

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

No, I hadn't seen the sunscreen stuff. Can you send/post a pointer?

meh. my super searching powers seem to be malfunctioning.

[trick.livejournal.com]

The articles I had seen (balanced, and not blasting from either side, as writers are wont to do with anything that's remotely controversial) are long gone...though I did find two of the references that had been dug up about it (though i'm pretty sure there was a *recent* study in early 2004, I can't seem to find anything but broken newslinks about it):

Schlumpf, Margret; Cotton, Beata, Conscience, Marianne; Haller, Vreni; Steinmann, Beate, Lictensteiger, Walter: In Vitro and In Vivo Estrogenicity of UV Screens: Environmental Health Perspectives, March 2001, Volume 109 Issue 3, Page 239.

Garland, Cedric F., et al. Could sunscreens increase melanoma risk? American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 82, No. 4, April 1992, pp. 614-15

Searches for those kind of yield interesting results, i'll let you pick which sites you want to believe out of google. Most of this was reported in British, Dutch, and Australian news, and I don't seem to be getting any decent hits from any of them.

Also, the conspiracy link (file this under "just because I'm crazy doesn't mean they're not following me").