ISSN 1662-4009 (online)

ESPE Yearbook of Paediatric Endocrinology (2022) 19 11.11 | DOI: 10.1530/ey.19.11.11

Department of Pediatrics, Halmstad Hospital, Halmstad, Sweden


anton.holmgren@regionhalland.se Pediatr Res. 2021 Jul;90(1):184–190. doi: 10.1038/s41390-020-01234-3.

Brief Summary: This observational study compared the pubertal growth spurt of children in a Spanish study group with severe early onset obesity to children in a Swedish community-based study. The authors show that childhood obesity impairs the pubertal growth spurt in a severity-related manner also in children with extreme obesity.

Since nearly 100 years we know that prepubertal children with obesity are in general taller than normal-weight children and that being overweight or obese during childhood is associated with increased height velocity [1], accompanied by advanced bone age. In 2016, these authors developed a shape-invariant growth model, QEPS, which describes the total pattern of growth in height from fetal life to adult height based on four basic growth functions and enables researchers to identify the impact of the pubertal growth spurt on total adult height [2]. Using this model, the authors had shown in a previous study in a community-based setting an inverse linear correlation between the highest childhood BMI SDS and specific pubertal height gain; the higher the BMI during childhood, the less the pubertal height gain [3]. As that study included only a limited number of children with obesity, here they expand their results to children with extreme obesity demonstrating the higher the BMI in childhood, the lower the pubertal height gain in children also when comparing moderate to extreme obesity.

Tall childhood stature relative to parents’ heights is a robust marker that obesity is nutritional in origin (rather than hormonal or syndromic) – but is not associated with taller adult height.

References: 1. Wolff OH. Obesity in childhood; a study of the birth weight, the height, and the onset of puberty. Q J Med. 1955;24(94):109–23. 2. Nierop AF, Niklasson A, Holmgren A, Gelander L, Rosberg S, Albertsson-Wikland K. Modelling individual longitudinal human growth from fetal to adult life - QEPS I. J Theor Biol. 2016;406:143–65. 3. Holmgren A, Niklasson A, Nierop AF, Gelander L, Aronson AS, Sjöberg A, Lissner L, Albertsson-Wikland K. Pubertal height gain is inversely related to peak BMI in childhood. Pediatr Res. 2017;81(3):448–54.

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