how tall will i be? very important question to a lot of families during child growth period wanting to know their height estimate.
Fifty centimeter that is the starting point, from which the average newborn will start to grow in length. They end up either as short as Napoleon or as tall as Le Bron James, This will be dictated mainly by genetics, height of the parents, hormone integrity and the unfortunate development of chronic illnesses.
We can approximate final height estimate of the child from his parents’ height:
For boys: you add 13 to mother’s height and then add that number to father’s height and divide it by two.
For girls: you subtract 13 from father’s height and add that number to mother’s height and divide it by two.
If the anticipated number you got shocked you as too short or too tall don’t sweat it, it is a rough estimate after all with wide variability of 805 cm either way.
In the previous calculation we assumed that the child won’t have
• Nutritional deficiency
• Chronic illness
• Hormonal abnormalities
• Genetic aberrancies
All of which will affect the ultimate length of your child. Your job here is to detect any deviation from normal height growth with the help of your pediatrician and intervene promptly to correct those deterring factors.
The road to evaluating short stature starts with the “Bone age” a radiographic image of the wrist. We compare that X-ray image of the wrist with peers’ wrist images of different ages to reach a match, which will tell your child Bone age.
If the Bone age is less than your child’s chronologic age; (let’s say the child is 10 years old while his bones looks like the bones of a child 8 years of age) that would mean your child most probably will continue to grow taller for two years after his peers stop growing length wise.
This is common in some families where they stay shorter than peers throughout school years to catch up with those peers toward the end of high school or early college years.
Things don’t run always so smoothly, in these cases a child short stature may be related to hormonal abnormalities like growth hormone or thyroid function diseases, or related to genetic diseases like Turner syndrome, or due to chronic illnesses like chronic kidney disease.
Remember time is of an essence here, because any appropriate interventions has to take place before the closure of the growing cartilages at the ends of long bones by calcification, after that closure, no bone length growth would be feasible except by orthopedic surgical means.
Written by Dr. Ammar Al Hakim, Pediatric consultant