In a five-year study using lambs, the research team found that leg growth occurred primarily when the animals were at rest. While the research does not provide a definitive link to nocturnal growth and the pain that some children experience, it does provide valuable new data and a possible explanation for growing pains, Lampl and colleagues say. Their results were recently published in the November/December 2004 issue of the Journal of Pediatric Orthopaedics.
As the first study to demonstrate actual bone growth spurts, it presents a significant leap forward in documenting the process of normal growth spurts, and suggests that infants and children may also grow when they are at rest, Lampl says.
"In children, we often view growth as a long continuous arc, especially if we look at annual growth measurements like the charts you might find in your pediatrician's office. However, growth is not so smooth, and occurs in spurts, as first shown some years ago among our studies of infants," Lampl says. "This is the first animal model to show that growth -- at the level of the bone -- is not a continuum."
To develop the animal model to test her theories, Lampl turned to Norman Wilsman, V.M.D., a professor of comparative biosciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's School of Veterinary Medicine, and his team. The results of their lamb study, which measured the leg bones every three minutes, showed that at least 90 percent of the bone growth occurred when the animals were at rest.
For more than a decade, Lampl has researched growth spurts and growing pains, and documented that children do grow in s
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Contact: Beverly Cox Clark
bclark2@emory.edu
404-712-8780
Emory University Health Sciences Center
11-Feb-2005