Patient's question:
My friend's daughter often says she is short, but compared to other little kids, she is a bit shorter. But what can we do? She often comes home crying, saying her classmates call her short, and she asks my friend to buy medicine for her. How can we calculate a child's height?Doctor's answer:
Height is related to many factors, among which it has a great relationship with genetics, nutrition, and the environment. The heritability of height is approximately 75%, meaning that 75% of adult height is determined by genetics, while 25% is determined by environmental factors. In other words, if the parents are tall, their children are also likely to be tall. You can roughly estimate it using the following formula: For boys, the adult height is equal to the sum of the father's height and the mother's height, multiplied by 2 and divided by 1.08. For girls, the adult height is equal to the father's height multiplied by 0.923, plus the sum of the mother's height, all divided by 2.