FDA Advisors Back Growth Hormone

The panel met Nicole Costa who at age 6 was started on a 7-year daily hormone injection therapy. Doctors predicted she would be a short person and because at age 17 she is 5'2" they consider her story a success.

Again. How do they know she wouldn't have reached this height naturally?

Certainly children can be cruel. But they can be that way if you're too tall, too fat, too smart, too quiet, too skinny, too dumb. The list is as endless as there are children. Possibly compromising the good health of a child for the sake of alleviating a temporary social discomfort isn't good enough reason for me.

Would it make for a more convenient life in the physical sense...reaching appliances, getting on a bus, etc. Should we reach for a world where we are made to fit some standard utility?

This new application bothers me as well about Eli Lilly's bid;

The advisers agonized over the decision, warning that dramatic growth like Nicole's is rare — most children will undergo lots of expense and trouble in hopes of growing roughly 2 inches taller.

"I'm worried about the medicalization of shortness," said women's health specialist Nancy Worcester of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the panel's consumer representative.

"We are talking about treating otherwise perfectly normal kids who are short for five to 10 years," with little information about long-term side effects, complained panelist Dr. Deborah Grady of the University of California, San Francisco.

Growth hormone has been used for 16 years to treat children who are extremely short because their bodies don't naturally produce the substance, and to treat a handful of other growth-stunting diseases. Some 200,000 children worldwide have taken it.

It sounds as if there's a rush to push this through. Why is there 'little information' about long-term side effects and these advisors are giving their nod of approval? That Eli Lilly is behind it makes it all the more suspicious.