I heard of the case of Adam Rainer, where his apparent condition called “acromegaly” caused him to grow uncontrollably beyond adolescence. He was both a dwarf at 19 and a giant at 33. How is this possible if growth plates predetermine height?

Question

I’ve been wondering this for a pretty long time

In: Biology

Answer 1

I don’t have acromegaly, but I did have osteosarcoma, a type of cancer. Normally during development you growth plates make cartilage and calcify that cartilage into bone at roughly equal rates, basically parallel to one another, moving up the bone. This causes bones to grow longer (wider is a bit different process). Eventually when your body reaches the determined size, through a combination of genetics, diet, and environmental factors, the rate of calcification of cartilage increases and catches up and overtakes the new cartilage growth which causes those cartilage producing cells to stop producing more cartilage and causing no new growth. If you look at many of the long bones of the body you can usually see this line where the end of the bone and the new growth of the bone fused together, especially internally.

In my case, there was some mutations in my left growth plate of my arm that caused that increase of calcification to never happen and it just kept growing. I had to have chemotherapy and surgery to remove my humerus (which is why I’m not very funny anymore :D). This hopefully gives you a bit of an insight to how this could happen. Adam Rainer was unlucky enough to have a mutation that affected many if not all of their growth plates causing them to never completey fuse.