ANTHROPOMETRIC CHARACTERIZATION OF PATIENTS WITH ACROMEGALY IN CROATIA - ESTIMATING STATURE FROM HAND LENGTH

Acromegaly is a rare disfiguring disease caused by hypersecretion of the growth hormone from the pituitary adenomas. Body proportions, including bones of the hand, have been widely used to estimate anthropometric measures, such as stature.The main aim of this study was to compare stature, hand length, and stature/hand length ratio in healthy and patients with acromegaly and evaluate the accuracy of using hand length for the estimation of stature in patients with acromegaly. A total of 44 patients with acromegaly were analyzed in comparison to the control group of 8944 phenotypically healthy individuals. Measurement data were analyzed using parametric and nonparametric tests, linear categorical regression (in healthy populations, and ordinal regression (in patients with acromegaly).The results show that the criterion stature could be predicted with hand length in both male and female individuals with acromegaly, while the amount of variance explained is something higher in males. Both in males and females, the stature/hand length ratio is higher in healthy individuals-compared to acromegalic ones.This information might be of use to endocrinologists, rheumatologists, forensic scientist as well as in research where anthropometric characterization is performed. Namely, stature estimation could be assessed inaccurately if acromegalic patients are included in the sample.