Children who receive growth hormone to treat short stature or hormone deficiency may be at an increased risk of strokes caused by burst blood vessels as young adults, a new European study has said.

While the overall risk of stroke is still low, the researchers said people who received growth hormone should know about the link between the treatment and later stroke risk.

"This information should also be made available to those who misuse (growth hormone) for improving athletic performances, body building, and other questionable reasons,"the French and British researchers wrote in the journal Neurology on Wednesday.

Growth hormone, first approved in the US in the mid-1980s, is given to children for a variety of reasons, including to treat pituitary gland problems and to increase the height of children with short stature.

The researchers, led by Dr. Amelie Poidvin of Paris Descartes University, said that little is known about the long-term effects of treating children with growth hormone.

An early report from an ongoing study said there is an increased risk of death from heart and vascular disease, the authors said. In addition, people who naturally produce too much growth hormone are known to be at increased risk of aneurysms, which raised the likelihood of brain bleeds, known as hemorrhagic strokes.

In general, so-called ischemic strokes caused by a blood vessel blockage are far more common than hemorrhagic strokes, which are usually the result of a broken blood vessel. Strokes of any kind are rare in young people, so the researchers looked at how common they were among kids who took growth hormone.

Changes in arteries

For the new study, they analyzed data on 6,874 children who were born before 1990 and received synthetic growth hormone in France between 1985 and 1996. The children included in the study were treated for low-risk conditions, such as not producing enough growth hormone on their own or having short stature.

It's not known how growth hormone may increase the risk of stroke, the researchers said, but it's possible that the drug leads to changes in arteries and how they work.

"What the study shows is that the treatment was associated with the increase in the risk, as opposed to not having the treatment,"Dr. Rebecca Ichord said.

Ichord, who wrote an editorial accompanying the new study, is director of the Pediatric Stroke Program at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

The researchers caution that their findings are limited by the small number of strokes and the fact that people included in the study may have other conditions related to both short stature and stroke.

Ichord said it's important to know that this study does not prove that growth hormone causes hemorrhagic strokes, "but we know there may be some kind of association. There's not really any preventive treatment for this type of brain bleed".

(China Daily 08/16/2014 page10)