Jürgen W. Spranger

Jürgen W. Spranger is presently (2000) affiliated with the Department of Paediatrics, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany.

Jürgen Spranger studied medicine at the universities of Tübingen, Heidelberg and Freiburg, graduating with distinction in 1956. After training in academic centres in Germany and North America, Spranger became senior physician in the department of paediatrics, University of Kiel, in 1968. In 1974 he was called to the chair at the University of Mainz, where he also became director of the Children's Hospital.

Spranger has been an editor-in-chief of the European Journal of Pediatrics, to which he is presently (2000) contributing editor.

Spranger is an authority on inherited skeletal disorders and has published more than 240 papers in this field. On a congress in Taunus in 1998 Spranger said that he saw no immediate breakthrough in the treatment of dwarfism, a disturbance occurring in more than one hundred forms. "But every year we obtain new knowledge that may help us intervene in certain forms of dwarfism." However, Spranger said he believed that the causes might soon be treated in cases where dwarfism is only a secondary symptom. In cases in which dwarfism is the main feature, however, he saw no possibility of treating the causes. "That may one day be made possible through gene therapy, but we are not there yet". Spranger is an advocate of cautiousness in the use of growth hormones.

• Jürgen W. Spranger, Leonard O. Langer, Jr., Hans-Rudolf Wiedemann:
  Bone dysplasias. An Atlas of Constitutional Disorders of Skeletal Development.
  Stuttgart and Philadelphia: G. Fischer and W. B. saunders, 1974.
• Klingelhöfer, Jürgen Spranger, Matthias, publishers:
  Klinikleitfaden Neurologie und Psychiatrie. Untersuchung, Diagnostik, Therapie, Notfall.
  820 pages. Stutgart, Gustav Fischer, 1996.
• Fritz, W. Küster, Karen Helene Ørstavik, Anna Naumova, Jürgen Spranger, Helga Rehder:
  Pigmentary mosaicism in hypomelanosis of Ito. Further evidence for functional disomy of Xp.
  Human Genetics, Berlin, 1998, 103: 4, 441-449.