Did any of you guys experience any growth when you started T?  My nephew is 15 and has started T but he's only 4'9" so I was wondering if/hoping he might hit a growth spurt because of the T.

That is a question the doctors can answer. It depends on when puberty started and to some degree how estrogen affected him. Estrogen causes the bone growth to cap early so if blockers are started early, the bones will follow an extended growth period resulting in more height. The doctors can X-ray the bones and determine how much growth is possible. They have been doing this for a long time so the estimate should be pretty good.

He might be early on enough to grow more, but it'll be hard to tell if its natural growth that would have happened normally...

I stopped growing at about 15, but i was also ill as a child and probably would have been taller otherwise...

I wouldn't be surprised if it caused him at least a minor growth spurt if not more.


     Hugs,
- Katie
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I was actually shorter than 5 feet tall until the summer after 9th grade (I would've been 15 at the time).  Some time before that, my parents actually took me to an endocrinologist to see if I could get some growth hormones.  I did end up getting them.  I'm now about 5'6".  Not tall, but not bad, considering my dad is 5'6" and my mom is 5'0".

I'm not sure exactly what they do, but from my experience and the little bit of reading I've done, they're what caused me to undergo puberty (I wonder what things would've been like had I not taken them) and begin growing as well as starting to develop sex characteristics (body hair, lower voice, etc.).

Before I started, they had to X-ray my wrists to see how much room for bone growth I had left, which is, as Dena said, found in a bone gap.  Since this gap closes as one ages, there will come a point when one is no longer able to benefit from the growth hormones.  They also took blood samples, which caused me to pass out once or twice.  That's how I discovered I get queasy when I see my blood being drawn.

If at all possible, I'd urge your nephew to visit an endocrinologist to see if this is an option.  If your nephew doesn't do it, and doesn't end up getting a growth spurt, he'd probably spend the rest of his life regretting it.  If it turns out that the growth spurt comes naturally, then everything is fine anyways.

One thing to note: I had to receive daily injections of the hormone from my parents.  I didn't like shots to begin with, and with my inexperienced parents doing it (I'm thankful they did it, of course), it did sometimes hurt.  Plus, I probably had roughly 5% body fat or less, and since the shot was supposed to be injected into body fat, it was sort of a challenge to find a good area to inject it.

Let me know if you have any more questions, and I can try to answer them.  I'm by no means an expert in endocrinology, though.

As some people have already said, it depends where he is in puberty/growth. At that height he probably has some growing still to go (unless he is genetically likely to be very short) and T might cause him to grow more than he would otherwise. A friend of mine took blockers and then started T at 16, he was on the short side beforehand and pretty much stopped growing at about 13 but had a major growth spurt just after starting T. So it can happen, it's really an individual thing but definitely a possibility for your nephew.