Aiming to decrease the estimated final heights of girls via DES hormone treatment

Height as an infliction

“I was a lot taller than all the others, I shot up like a bamboo plant pretty early, and I remember thinking I was unlucky to be so tall”.

“Afterwards I’ve had a few problems, some of which have nothing to do with the treatment, but I’ve started to wonder whether there could be a connection,”

“I gained a lot of weight and had a strong need of sweets. And when I say strong I mean very strong. It was like a kind of dependency, as with tobacco or alcohol or whatever. Fortunately I was an active swimmer at the time, or I would have become terribly fat,”

“My nipples changed colour and became nearly black. This wasn’t so fun for a girl who was often in the public showers of the swimming hall,”

“My personality changed and I started stealing and lying. These were things that I had no tendencies toward before – I had been dutiful and terribly afraid of doing anything wrong,”

said Kristin Espestøyl who, from age 11 to 14, took one pill a day, which contained about three times as much oestrogen as a common contraceptive pill.

Read Height as an infliction, sciencenordic, December 11, 2011.

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