Post by Admin on Jun 22, 2017 16:52:23 GMT
www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/growing-pains
"Though there is very little scientific evidence relating to the effects of puberty suppression on children with gender dysphoria — and there certainly have been no controlled clinical trials comparing the outcomes of puberty suppression to the outcomes of alternative therapeutic approaches — there are reasons to suspect that the treatments could have negative consequences for neurological development. Scientists at the University of Glasgow recently used puberty-suppressing treatments on sheep, and found that the spatial memory of male sheep was impaired by puberty suppression using GnRH analogues,[117] and that adult sheep that were treated with GnRH analogues near puberty continued to show signs of impaired spatial memory.[118] In a 2015 study of adolescents treated with puberty suppression, the authors claimed that “there are no detrimental effects of [GnRH analogues] on [executive functioning],”[119] but the results of their study were more ambiguous and more suggestive of harm than that summary indicates.[120] (It is also worth noting that the study was conducted on a small number of subjects, which makes the detection of significant differences difficult.)
In addition to the reasons to suspect that puberty suppression may have side effects on physiological and psychological development, the evidence that something like normal puberty will resume for these patients after puberty-suppressing drugs are removed is very weak. This is because there are virtually no published reports, even case studies, of adolescents withdrawing from puberty-suppressing drugs and then resuming the normal pubertal development typical for their sex. Rather than resuming biologically normal puberty, these adolescents generally go from suppressed puberty to medically conditioned cross-sex puberty, when they are administered cross-sex hormones at approximately age 16. During this time, as per the Dutch protocol, puberty-suppressing GnRH analogues continue to be administered to prevent the initiation of gonadarche; the sex hormones that are normally secreted by the maturing gonads are not produced, and physicians administer sex hormones normally produced by the gonads of the opposite sex. This means that adolescents undergoing cross-sex hormone treatment circumvent the most fundamental form of sexual maturation — the maturation of their reproductive organs. Patients undergoing sex reassignment discontinue GnRH treatment after having their gonads removed, since the secretion of sex hormones that the treatment is ultimately intended to prevent will no longer be possible."
"Though there is very little scientific evidence relating to the effects of puberty suppression on children with gender dysphoria — and there certainly have been no controlled clinical trials comparing the outcomes of puberty suppression to the outcomes of alternative therapeutic approaches — there are reasons to suspect that the treatments could have negative consequences for neurological development. Scientists at the University of Glasgow recently used puberty-suppressing treatments on sheep, and found that the spatial memory of male sheep was impaired by puberty suppression using GnRH analogues,[117] and that adult sheep that were treated with GnRH analogues near puberty continued to show signs of impaired spatial memory.[118] In a 2015 study of adolescents treated with puberty suppression, the authors claimed that “there are no detrimental effects of [GnRH analogues] on [executive functioning],”[119] but the results of their study were more ambiguous and more suggestive of harm than that summary indicates.[120] (It is also worth noting that the study was conducted on a small number of subjects, which makes the detection of significant differences difficult.)
In addition to the reasons to suspect that puberty suppression may have side effects on physiological and psychological development, the evidence that something like normal puberty will resume for these patients after puberty-suppressing drugs are removed is very weak. This is because there are virtually no published reports, even case studies, of adolescents withdrawing from puberty-suppressing drugs and then resuming the normal pubertal development typical for their sex. Rather than resuming biologically normal puberty, these adolescents generally go from suppressed puberty to medically conditioned cross-sex puberty, when they are administered cross-sex hormones at approximately age 16. During this time, as per the Dutch protocol, puberty-suppressing GnRH analogues continue to be administered to prevent the initiation of gonadarche; the sex hormones that are normally secreted by the maturing gonads are not produced, and physicians administer sex hormones normally produced by the gonads of the opposite sex. This means that adolescents undergoing cross-sex hormone treatment circumvent the most fundamental form of sexual maturation — the maturation of their reproductive organs. Patients undergoing sex reassignment discontinue GnRH treatment after having their gonads removed, since the secretion of sex hormones that the treatment is ultimately intended to prevent will no longer be possible."