Neglect of growth and development in the clinical monitoring of children and teenagers with inflammatory bowel disease: review of case records

Failure of growth and retarded sexual development are serious and common problems in children and teenagers with inflammatory bowel disease, particularly Crohn's disease. Thus height, weight, sexual staging, and bone age should be closely monitored in such patients. In 1989 we reported serious underrecording of these variables of growth in a cohort of Scottish children with inflammatory bowel disease.1 We assessed the situation a decade later. We studied 28 boys and 13 girls aged 16 years at first admission to hospital with ulcerative colitis (n=14) or Crohn's disease (n=27). These patients, identified from the Scottish hospitals database of inpatients statistics for 1984-88, were resident in four of the Scottish regions. We reviewed the patients' case records and noted whether height, …