Oestrogen treatment given to tall adolescent girls to reduce their final adult height can lead to fertility problems, Australian scientists said on Friday.

They found that women who had received the therapy as teenagers took longer to conceive and were twice as likely as other women to have needed fertility treatment.

“Our findings indicate that exposure to high-dose oestrogens in adolescence is associated with impaired fertility later in life,” said Alison Venn, of the University of Tasmania. The findings are reported in The Lancet medical journal.

Oestrogen treatment to limit the height attained by young women has been available since the 1950s. It changes the development of the long bones and has been reported to decrease adult height by 2-10 cm (0.7-4 inches).

The researchers studied 1,243 women who had been assessed for the treatment since 1959. Half had actually received the hormone therapy.

“Although the possibility of adverse reproductive effects of oestrogen treatment for tall stature in girls has been acknowledged for many years, we believe ours is the first study to report long-term follow-up of the reproductive experience of a large cohort of treated girls,” Venn added.

SOURCE: The Lancet, October 232, 2004.