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as the school season begins, the topic of conversation among parents quickly changes from summer camp to their children's studies and health.

everyone is discussing what kind of children can make parents worry less? there is a popular joke on the internet, which talks about the "four standards of a new filial son":

no growth hormone injections, no orthodontic treatments, no allergy medications, and no cost for studying.

do you think that the chinese way of raising children has invested all their money in tutoring classes?in fact, parents have higher demands on their children's physical hardware, and their number one concern is their head.

in order to make children have a satisfactory height, a magical growth hormone injection has become popular. what exactly is growth hormone? can this expensive small bottle of medicine really make children grow taller? are there any costs and hidden dangers behind it?

looking at her daughter duoduo's height mark on the door frame, wang qin felt anxious.

in the past few years, the child's height increased by 6 to 7 centimeters every year, but in recent years, it has only increased by 3 to 4 centimeters. the most important thing is that she and her husband are not tall. duoduo, a fourth-grader, is 1.38 meters tall. every time wang qin sends her child to school, she is sad to see her daughter walking side by side with her classmates, with a huge height difference. is her daughter destined to be a short person when she grows up? wang qin is not willing to accept this.

stills from our little sister

chen lei's son is 1.45 meters tall in the fifth grade. in his eyes, the child is not short. because when he was a child, people were generally not as tall as they are now. but there is no harm without comparison.

chen lei shared an experience he had. one night, he met a 1.8-meter-tall strong man on the street who asked him to borrow a cell phone. his first reaction was to be startled, but when he looked closely, he saw that the "strong man" was wearing a red scarf.upon asking, we found out that this was a sixth-grade primary school student who came to borrow the phone because his watch was out of battery and he couldn't find his mother.

chen lei sighed, wondering why children nowadays are so tall. in comparison, his own child really looks like a dwarf.

chen lei's feeling is not wrong. a study of more than 60 million people published in the authoritative medical journal the lancet showed that between 1985 and 2019,china's average height increase for 19-year-old men is the highest in the world.it increased by nearly 8 cm to 175.7 cm; the increase in 19-year-old women ranked third in the world, increasing by nearly 6 cm to 163.5 cm.

the heights of chinese 19-year-old men and women are both higher than those of japan (172.2 and 158.5 cm) and south korea (175.5 and 163.2 cm).becoming the first in east asia. but parents are even more anxious.

chen lei has done a lot of research on how tall a child can grow. 70% of a person's height is determined by genetics.

in medicine, there is a concept called genetic target height, which is the genetic height of a child calculated based on the height of the child's parents.

just like the chinese swimming team at the paris olympics this year, which was full of tall people, the selection of their players was very much based on their genetic conditions.the sum of the heights of both parents exceeds 350cmchild.

but in addition to the 70%, there is also a 30% acquired factor. parents like wang qin and chen lei are more happy to see cases like pan zhanle.

the total height of pan zhanle's parents was only 339cm, but through acquired efforts, pan zhanle broke through the genetic limitations and finally grew to 192cm, becoming a "100-meter flying fish."

if parents are not tall enough, helping their children to reach this 30% is the most urgent thing for wang qin and chen lei.

wang qin said that the whole family tried their best to help their children grow taller. the most basic nutritious diet of meat, eggs and milk was a must. the five or six hundred basketball and badminton classes and other physical education courses have also become a routine.

chen lei used some strange tricks and folk remedies on his children. he had them practice hanging on parallel bars, touching the roof... all kinds of tricks. he even had them drink rooster blood...

however, after being among the parents who “chase high prices” for a long time, everyone knows a method that stands at the top of all the “secret recipes” -injection of "growth hormone".

wang qin lifted her daughter's shirt, found a spot around her belly button, and quickly injected the "sazen" injection into her daughter.

"saizeng" is a brand of growth hormone that wang qin had heard of a long time ago, because the neighbor's child had been injected with it for more than two years.in her opinion, the children of her neighbors have never been short. however, her daughter duoduo has always had a "low growth curve" since birth.

after two years of observation and questioning, wang qin found that the neighbor's child had indeed grown a lot taller, and there were no side effects of growth hormone injections. finally, she decided to inject growth hormone into her daughter.

after a week of searching online, i finally got an appointment with an expert at the endocrinology department of the children's hospital. the doctor diagnosed that duoduo's height was indeed 5 to 10 cm lower than the average for women of the same age. the doctor also determined that duoduo was partially deficient in growth hormone, but she could take it or not.without any hesitation, wang qin immediately asked to give duoduo growth hormone.

the growth hormone "saizen" she chose for her daughter is a short-acting liquid preparation that is injected once a day. this is also the advice given to wang qin by her neighbor's mother.

there are three main types of growth hormones commonly found on the market: powder and liquid for daily injection, and long-acting agent for weekly injection. the prices of the three types increase in sequence, and the most expensive long-acting liquid agent is generally unaffordable for families. short-acting liquid agents are the mainstream products.

although powder is cheap, it is troublesome to use. you need to prepare the medicine yourself and use a disposable syringe for injection. the needle tip of this type of needle is thick and the injection is painful.many mothers' hands tremble when they use syringes to inject powder into their children, and they simply cannot bear to pierce the needle into the child's flesh. moreover, such pain has to be done every day, and the child suffers too much.

although the short-acting liquid preparation is also injected once a day, it uses a hidden needle electronic pen. the needle of this injection is hidden, and the needle mouth is thin and short, and the injection dosage is also very accurate, which is very convenient to operate at home.the neighbor’s children no longer need injections from their mothers; they can get injections themselves every day.

it is convenient, but in wang qin's opinion, this short-acting liquid is already very expensive. take the neighbor's child as an example. he currently weighs 45 kg and needs to be injected with 10u every day. the price of a bottle of ciazine is 1031 yuan/30u.this would cost nearly 10,000 yuan a month. if the injections were given for two years, the cost would be 240,000 yuan.

although duoduo does not have such high expenses at present, as the child's weight increases, the injection dosage will also increase, and the cost will become higher and higher in the future.

li yali doesn't think it's expensive.she believes her son was born in a lucky era because height is "a problem that can be solved with money".

li yali is 157cm tall and her husband is 172cm tall. after a bone examination, the doctor estimated that her son's ideal height in the future would not exceed 173cm.

li yali was not satisfied with this number. "the height of boys is very important. boys nowadays should be at least 180cm tall."

li yali had only one goal, which was to give her child growth hormone to raise his weight to 180.

although there is no particularly obvious indication for growth hormone injection, li yali has consulted foreign literature and found that even if there is no growth hormone deficiency in the body, increasing the dose of growth hormone on the basis of meeting the medication requirements can also have the effect of promoting growth.

whenever her family thought that her behavior of injecting growth hormone into her children was too radical, li yali would bring up the story of the famous argentine football star messi, because it was growth hormone that made the short messi embark on the road to becoming a football king.

li yali firmly believes in the secret recipe of growth hormone. she can use money to make her child reach a height of 180 cm.

indeed, many parents have benefited from growth hormone treatment. wang qin's daughter duoduo grew about 8 centimeters taller after using growth hormone for 8 months. the effect is too obvious; li yali's son is also growing taller, and the ideal height of 180 cm no longer seems to be an unattainable dream.

what exactly is growth hormone, a miracle drug for increasing height?

in the 1970s,growth hormone is extracted from corpses, used to treat dwarfism,because it takes 100 corpses to extract the pituitary glands needed to treat a child for a year.so auxin ismore expensive than gold。

in 1985, auxin could finally be synthesized through genetic recombination technology, which made mass production of auxin possible.

it was not until around 2010 that the price of growth hormone dropped from being unaffordable to barely within the reach of the general public.

nowadays, ordinary parents like wang qin, li yali and chen lei are already familiar with the names of various growth hormones such as "saizen" and "ansumeng". in their eyes, growth hormone has become a panacea for children to grow taller.

behind parents' pursuit of growth hormone, the domestic growth hormone market is booming.

data show thatthe market size of growth hormone has increased from 1.19 billion yuan in 2014 to 5.519 billion yuan in 2019, with a compound growth rate of 35.91%.

the "saigo" that wang qin and many parents use for their children comes from jinsai pharmaceutical, which is a leading domestic growth hormone company. in 2021, jinsai pharmaceutical's market share in the entire domestic growth hormone market was as high as 78%.

over the past decade, relying on the sales of growth hormones, jinsai pharmaceutical's profits have increased from 33 million yuan in 2001 to 2.8 billion yuan in 2020, an increase of nearly 100 times.

but the hidden concern of the booming industry is the side effects and risk of abuse of growth hormones.

wu xueyan, chief physician of the department of endocrinology at peking union medical college hospital, once said in an interview with a media outlet that growth hormone is not suitable for everyone. patients with active malignant tumors and those with completely closed epiphyses cannot use growth hormone.

because the epiphysis is closed, growth stops. continuing to use growth hormone may cause acromegaly, resulting in enlarged hands and feet and ugly face. at this time, the bones are deformed instead of lengthened.

in addition to these clear contraindications, wu xueyan clearly opposes some people who try to grow taller by injecting growth hormone without any indication. the main reason is thatin the long term, it is difficult to say that there are no side effects of using growth hormone.

when wang qin took her child to the hospital, she found that most of the children who were injected with growth hormone did not have dwarfism. they just wanted their children to be taller and taller.

it is not difficult for wang qin to get prescription drugs such as growth hormone. although the hospital can only prescribe a few at a time, the doctor will leave the contact information of the pharmaceutical manufacturer on the medicine box. parents can buy more than 90 days of dosage at a time by contacting the manufacturer.

because li yali's child did not have an indication for growth hormone injection, she bought the medicine from clinics and agents outside the hospital. she said that many people buy growth hormone through this channel, which may have become the mainstream channel for "high-price" parents to get growth hormone.

recently, li yali discovered that her child had grown significantly taller after taking growth hormone.i am nearsighted.she recalled a statement she had seen online: when a person grows too fast, the eye axis will also grow too long, leading to myopia. li yali asked doctors and pharmaceutical sales, and they all said that the online content had no scientific basis and that there was no direct connection between growth hormone and vision.

but seeing that there was still two months' worth of growth hormone in the refrigerator, li yali's enthusiasm for raising her child's height cooled. should she stop using it temporarily? should she wait and see how the child's eyesight would improve? but the child had not yet reached her ideal height, would stopping using it now mean all her efforts would be wasted? li yali was in a dilemma...