Hi Bonnie,

I am sorry about your son’s advanced bone age. I know how worrisome that can be, as my son also has advanced bone age due to CAH. My only point is...shouldn’t the doctors first figure out a specific cause of the premature adrenarche (i.e. give you a diagnosis), before deciding how to treat it, or whether it even needs to be treated at all? In other words, if you know your son doesn’t have CAH, yet you are treating him as if he has CAH....perhaps it’s a case of the solution not matching the problem, and that is why treatment isn’t working?

I am sorry if I am misunderstanding the situation, as I know it is easy to get only part of the picture--and, therefore, a mistaken impression---in a forum such as this.

Here are a couple of articles on puberty that you may find helpful, if you haven’t seen them already. They help to differentiate the situations when premature development is "normal" and when there can be underlying disease. The first is much more suited for the layperson, the second much more technical. This excerpt from the second article seems to suggest that---in some situations where there is no underlying illness---you can still have some bone age acceleration and accelerated growth, but it all evens out in the end.

"....Thus, premature adrenarche appears to cause a transient acceleration in growth and bone maturation with negligible effects on the onset and progression of puberty and final height (157, 189)...."

Good luck.

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http://www.aafp.org/afp/990700ap/209.html

http://edrv.endojournals.org/cgi/content/full/21/6/671