The number of children being treated for precocious puberty is surging as parents worry excessively about their sole child while some doctors profit from overdiagnosis.
According to the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service, a staggering 60,900 girls under 11 and boys under 12 were prescribed GnRH agonist, a treatment for precocious puberty, more than double the number from 2017. The number surged five times for boys. For girls under nine, diagnoses tripled from 449.7 per 100,000 to 1,414.7 and rose six times for boys under 10.
Premature puberty may be rising in advanced countries due to obesity and other factors, but the steep surge in Korea is highly unusual. Precocious puberty diagnoses stood 23.3 per 100,000 children from 2004 to 2010, a whopping 20 times more than in Spain. They also increased at a much higher rate than anywhere else in the world since 2010.
HIRAS attributes this trend to excessive diagnoses of precocious puberty due a lack of government supervision, which lets clinics' profit motive off the leash.
In 2003, state insurance coverage was expanded to include girls under nine and boys under 10 diagnosed with precocious puberty. The aim was to make sure that the then-rare cases were not left out of the loop.
But some hospitals and clinics are clearly abusing this benefit. A lot of children appear to be being diagnosed with the problem at the last minute when treatment is still covered.
As of 2020, 82 percent of boys with precocious puberty were diagnosed at the age of nine. But experts say at that age children just hit early puberty and related hormone levels rise naturally, so a considerable number of those cases are viewed as pathological when they are not.
Some pharmaceutical companies also have an interest in marketing drugs that promote growth, claiming that puberty blockers stunt children's growth. That means some parents are then spending W600,000 to W1 million to administer growth hormone injections (US$1=W1,333).
HIRAS has now put precocious puberty on a watchlist for overdiagnosis.
