Recently I got a message or comment to the website where someone would link to a study that Tyler from HeightQuest.com had written about in the post “Reverse Ossification”

The study or article was entitled “Growth Plate Reappearance after Closure in Ankle Radiography for Trauma“

Article abstract:

Bone growth plates or physis are present at the end of long bones and are responsible for longitudinal growth. These plates consist of 4 layers and are lucent in radiography as a line perpendicular to the longitudinal axis, Because of cartilage layer x-ray absorption is less than calcified bone. Gradually increases with age and bone maturity these line will be narrower and as longitudinal bone growth stops, the line disappears. This phenomenon occurs at different ages in different bones of the skeleton but with complete maturity at the age of 19, all growth plates are closed and sclerosed. Re-appearing after closing is uncommon. We introduce two young patients in this study due to trauma have been treated for an ankle cast and the growth plates of tibia and fibula in their control X-ray was re-appeared. Subchondrel Bone Resorbtion is a known phenomenon that will occur after 6 to 8 weeks immobility in any bone. The lucent line caused by imbalance in osteoblast and osteoclast activity and bone absorption. Re-appearing of growth plates can be caused by reversed ossification and bone absorption.

Analysis

Months ago Tyler had brought the article to my attention when he asked for my help in finding some way to translate the article written in Persian/Farsi since the article was written by medical researchers based in Iran. I tried using Google Translate and Yahoo’s Babel Fish technology without success.

After getting some extra time to looking back at the study and really think over what is really going on, I wanted to make some observations about what is going on. The first thing I see is that the doctors say that “Re-appearing after closing is uncommon”

The way they word the phrase makes a person who is really intent on finding a way to reverse the ossification think that maybe the reappearance of growth plates happen a lot more often then say “NEVER”.

Are these researchers saying that they have seen growth plate reappearance before in other cases? Because I have not in any studies, medical textbooks, or journals.

Here is what I guess is really going on. The cartilage is indeed there. The X-rays they see show that the absorption rate is lower. If we look at how X-rays turn out, we remember that the calcified bones will absorb more so the color on the X-rays is much lighter, or transparent. The less absorption on X-rays turn out darker and less transparent.

What you see in the article which Tyler copied to the Post is a series of X-rays but I would say even after looking at long bone X-rays before that I can’t really see what the growth plate is supposed to have regenerated.

The picture to the right is the only X-rays where I am noticing any type of mark or fracture in the bones. If we look at the way the dark line is on the bone, I would say that the line is very straight, and not curved and crooked like how the cartilage appears in young pig ankles, which I showed in one of the website’s YouTube video HERE

At this point, I would say that the darker shade of line on the tibia area is not the hyaline growth plate cartilage coming back but something else.

That something else I am proposing is actually fibrocartilage. Fibrocartilage is what would be formed if you managed to puncture or lacerate the bone deep enough to get below the subchondrel layer of the cortical bone.

When I was doing research on the subject of microfracture surgery I wrote a post about the possibility of using microfracture surgery to grow taller entitled “Increase Height And Grow Taller Using Microfracture Surgery, Part I”

From the Wikipedia article….

Through use of an awl, the surgeon creates tiny fractures in the subchondral bone plate.^[9] Blood and bone marrow (which contains stem cells) seep out of the fractures, creating a blood clot that releases cartilage-building cells

Analysis

The principle of microfracture surgery results in the fact that the cells in the bone marrow will seep out and the progenitor adult stem cells will first differentiate into the chondrogenic lineage, at least at first.

All the physicians are in agreement that when the surgeon uses the awl to drill a hole into articular cartilage, the cartilage that is formed is fibrocartilage, not hyaline cartilage. In the procedure section on how microfracture surgery is done, the awl is a drill tool that goes pass the hard cortical bone layer and reaches to the spongy, more porous cancellous bone area where the marrow and adult progenitor cells are.

And this is what I think is really showing up in the X-rays of this document that Tyler and the other person found. That straight dark line that slices horizontally across the X-ray I am saying is more likely a bone fracture that is mostly likely filled with progenitor cells which wil turn it into fibrocartilage, not the hyaline type of cartilage the Iranian researchers claim them to be.

I wrote about a proposed idea on how we could theoretically use the fibrocartilage that is formed to increase our height at “A Proposed Height Increase Method Using Microfracture Surgery Techniques With Fibrocartilage Formation”

Perhaps there might be a possibility to combine the propose method from the post above with trauma injury type os incidents which lead to X-rays showing fibrocartilage formation. I said in the recent post that to do reverse ossification properly, we would have to have at least two major stages that not only happen at the same time, but also happen sequentially. they are…

1. One step would be to somehow remove the hard inorganic, nonliving tissue between the bone cells (osteocytes) and lacunae in the extracellular matrix of the bones. 

2. The second step would be to be able to cause only chondrogenesis (to create cartilage) to occur in the area which lost the inorganic nonliving tissue. 

Remember that ossification is where either the chondrocytes turns into osteocytes and osteoblasts or they die leaving the spaces for the osteocytes to take up later in development.

This is like how life goes. You can either turn into something else through evolution or a transformation or you die out to be replaced by something else. If you want that process to go in reverse, you would either have to figure out how to do transdiferrentiation, which the immortal hydra had figured out how to do, or you have to figure out how to reverse in the aging process, which the immortal hydra also figured out.

Since we are not talking about the entire body as an organism, but also a section of our body to regenerate back the cartilage we lost from the natural growth process, it would be much easier to first remove the dead, non-organic, hard calcium miineral deposits first. After the deposits are removed, then you replace over the now empty space with cartilage forming chondrocytes with some type of injection or growth factor mixture.

I would conclude with two things.

1. The X-rays is not showing growth plate hyaline cartilage re-appearance, but actually some type of fracture that was made by the injury. The bone is cracked and maybe some other body tissue has gotten into the bone cracked region.

1. If the X-rays is not a fracture, but actually cartilage, then it is not the hyaline cartilage we are looking for, but actually fibrocartilage that has seeped out of the cavity and the trabecular bone from the inside.

Let’s look at what is stated in the beginning of the young kids who are getting their X-rays looked at.

In recent news for the last week, there was reports coming out about the fact that a team of researchers in Oregon (Oregon Health & Science University) managed to be able to produce stem cells from cloning human embryos for the first time.

NBC News: Cloning technique produces human stem cells for the first time

What I wanted to talk about in this post is just how this type of news, about the fascinating new branch of biomedical research, will possibly effect the height increase endeavor for the coming years and even decades.

First, what is the endeavor of even doing stem cells research in the first place, at least for this group of researchers?

Answer: “…use cloning technology to make human embryos and grow stem cells from them in the hopes of making perfectly matched grow-your-own tissue transplants.”

The article writer goes into a very superficial description of what the researchers did with….

“They used a human egg cell and parts of a human skin cell to grow a very early human embryo, then transformed cells from this ball of cells into beating heart cells and skin cells. The process may eventually help treat a range of diseases, from Parkinson’s to rare inherited conditions, they reported Wednesday…”

The scientific abstract they referenced to from the journal Cell was “Human Embryonic Stem Cells Derived by Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer”

Cell, 15 May 2013
Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
10.1016/j.cell.2013.05.006

Authors

What we are seeing is that

Something to note here is the term “Oocyte”. From the Wikipedia article on oocytes…

An oocyte, oöcyte, ovocyte, or rarely ocyte, is a female gametocyte or germ cell involved in reproduction. In other words, it is animmature ovum, or egg cell. An oocyte is produced in the ovary during female gametogenesis. The female germ cells produce a primordial germ cell (PGC) which undergoes mitosis to form an oogonium. During oogenesis the oogonium becomes a primary oocyte.

Analysis #2:

Let’s go back to the scientific article that was cited, Human Embryonic Stem Cells Derived by Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer

Summary

Reprogramming somatic cells into pluripotent embryonic stem cells (ESCs) by somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) has been envisioned as an approach for generating patient-matched nuclear transfer (NT)-ESCs for studies of disease mechanisms and for developing specific therapies. Past attempts to produce human NT-ESCs have failed secondary to early embryonic arrest of SCNT embryos. Here, we identified premature exit from meiosis in human oocytes and suboptimal activation as key factors that are responsible for these outcomes. Optimized SCNT approaches designed to circumvent these limitations allowed derivation of human NT-ESCs. When applied to premium quality human oocytes, NT-ESC lines were derived from as few as two oocytes. NT-ESCs displayed normal diploid karyotypes and inherited their nuclear genome exclusively from parental somatic cells. Gene expression and differentiation profiles in human NT-ESCs were similar to embryo-derived ESCs, suggesting efficient reprogramming of somatic cells to a pluripotent state.

Interpretation

What we see is that this experimental study somehow managed to figure out around the decade old problem on how to create stable human nuclear transfer-embryonic stem cells (NT-ESCs)

As states in the introduction of the article…

In humans, SCNT was envisioned as a means of generating personalized embryonic stem cells from patients’ somatic cells, which could be used to study disease mechanisms and ultimately for cell-based therapies (Lanza et al., 1999; Yang et al., 2007). However, the derivation of human nuclear transfer-embryonic stem cells (NT-ESCs) has not been achieved despite numerous attempts during the past decade. The roadblock responsible for failure is early embryonic arrest of human SCNT embryos precluding derivation of stable NT-ESCs. Typically, SCNT embryos fail to progress beyond the eight-cell stage, presumably due to an inability to activate critical embryonic genes from the somatic donor cell nucleus (Egli et al., 2011;Noggle et al., 2011)

After noticing in lab rhesus monkeys that their fibroblast skin cells could be reprogrammed into the NT-ESCs they were looking for so they state “…Therefore, we reasoned that, similar to other mammals, human MII oocytes must contain reprogramming activity.”

This is where they got the idea of using the very early stage of the ovum right before fertilization and removing the nucleus for its reprogramming activity.

For the researchers who are going to use the stem cells that make tissue for medical reasons , I agree with the general idea that the best option for people is to become their own donors since it seems that it is much harder for some people to find that perfect donor for them.

As stated in the article….

“…using a patient’s own cells offers potentially huge advantages. “A lot of patients don’t have an optimal donor,” he said. So bone marrow transplants are done only for the patients in the most dire need.

“If we could make every patient their own donor … we would bypass the transplant barrier,” he said. “Everyone could be a donor for themselves.””

Implications For Height Increase Research:

We found that from our bone marrow, which is what is inside the long bone intermedullary cavity, some types of stem cells which have limited differentiating ability. They can differentiate into chondrocytes if we really focused on just finding the right growth factors to induce them into the chondrogenic lineage, although it seems that most growth factors are both osteogenic and chondrogenic. If we can get the stem cells ,in say the epiphysis or diaphysis, to turn chondrogenic, there is still not enough time for them to form the cartilage tissue needed to expand and push the bones longitudinally before turning into the osteblasts and osteocytes. The recent news about this group of university researchers in oregon makes me think about the possibility of injecting the newly created stem cells using somatic cell nuclear transfer into human bone for to form cartilage tissue or growing the blastocytes derived into epiphyseal hyaline cartilage. This approach may be the easiest way to make real growth plates in the lab using non-controversial methods like taking the pluripotent stem cells from embryos.  

Sometimes it really surprises even me just how common the desire to become taller is, even among the best, most talented, most accomplished, and most beautiful humans on earth. I had written about the fact that the immensely popular, international Korean singer Boa had expressed constantly her regret in not drinking enough milk when she was younger and desiring to be taller in the post “Korean Singer Boa Is Dissatisfied Over Her Height”. I was reading the news on CNN and the story of this olympic medalist japanese figure skater named Daisuke Takahashi appeared which got me interested. It seems that for this Japanese young male, he really cares about how he looks and seems to have some type of insecurity over how he looks compared to other people, even after all he has accomplished.

I will be only taking a small section of the full article to show where he talks about his desire to become taller.

CNN Article: Daisuke Takahashi: Japan’s golden boy on the importance of being ‘gorgeous’

Despite his success — he also won silver at last year’s worlds — the 27-year-old admits he still looks up to his rivals.

“I never thought I have anything special. I’ve always thought about what I don’t have compared to other skaters,” he says.

“I tend to think like other skaters get more applause than I do. I constantly think about ways I can level up, and I’m often jealous of other skaters,” he adds, laughing. “When I see someone’s cool performance, it makes me want to be like them, and that’s what motivates me.”

A big part of figure skating is the outfits — often elaborate lycra creations that might otherwise seem more at home in a musical stage show.

“I don’t have long legs and arms, and I am … short,” quips Takahashi. “So I want something that makes me look taller and with longer legs and arms.

“I want something will make me a bit bigger, and so something with flaps that give my arms a little flow.”

I guess the thing to really understand is that maybe this desire to become taller is something that people wish for because they are constantly comparing themselves to other people and go through cycles of feeling inadequate, unattractive, jealousy, and competitiveness.

This innate desire to always be comparing ourselves to other humans to see who is better off, in terms of all the measurable (and non measurable) qualities that make life better may be something that can not be turned off. Insecurity runs in almost everyone expect the most secure people with the highest levels of self esteem. Maybe the reason why we all seem to want to be taller is because we can’t fully accept ourselves with who we are and when we look at our naked bodies in the mirror, we feel only disappoint.

However, would being taller solve all of our self esteem issues? If we did find an alternative solution to become taller than through limb lengthening surgery, and we had the procedure done to us to make us into the height we desired, would that stop our madness to want to improve ourselves and keep growing (figuratively)?

I don’t know what Daisuke Takahashi is thinking in his head, and can only guess at the possible reasons on why he wishes for his limbs to be longer. He says that with having longer limbs he would be better looking. All I wanted to say is that this young man who is loved by his nation and admired throughout the world still wishes to become better looking by being taller.

I guess height is something that will always be valued and strived for.

This is one of those articles which I realized that had to be written at some point to make sure I was complete and thorough in all of my research. At this point it is rather obvious for the long time visitor that if we had the ability to use the grow taller treatment when we still had open growth plates known as growth hormone injections of growth hormone therapy, most of us who tried would have ended up with a taller final height.

I have NOT written extensively about the possibility of using growth hormone therapy and treatments to make children who have short stature (below average stature in their age range) which is the result of growth hormone deficiency to make them taller. Instead, I have probably written more about growth hormone secretagogues than the actual growth hormones that are around. I have written about growth hormone segretagogues in the post “What Are Growth Hormone Secretagogues?”. It has been shown in many studies and experiments that not just growth hormones, but also the growth hormone secretagogues would also cause increased growth rates and adult height.

One thing that the general public doesn’t know is that the pituitary gland that is releasing the GH is also responsible for releasing a few other types of hormones that control the endocrine function of the body. The pituitary gland releases both the growth hormone, which is known as somatropins or somatotropins and also the compound known as somatostatins. Both of these seem to be from the anterior region of the pituitary gland.

Something to note is that there is both synthetic and natural growth hormones. The growth hormones that are taken from human cadavers is known as just hGH and the growth hormone made from recombinant DNA technology is known as rhGH.

There is probably over dozens of PubMed Studies which show that injecting growth hormones like Humatrope, Somatropin, Nutropin, and Genotropin in a young child who is still growing with open growth plates will lead to them developing a higher growth rate and end up taller when they finish growing vertically.

Only 5 studies are chosen to be listed below. The main point is that for some people, getting injected with growth hormones will make them taller.

1. Effect of growth hormone therapy on height in children with idiopathic short stature: a meta-analysis.
2. Effect of growth hormone treatment on adult height of children with idiopathic short stature. Genentech Collaborative Group.
3. Growth velocity, final height and bone mineral metabolism of short children treated long term with growth hormone.
4. Final height after combined growth hormone and gonadotrophin-releasing hormone analogue therapy in short healthy children entering into normally timed puberty.
5. Adult height in short normal girls treated with gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogs and growth hormone.

If the reader would prefer to read over the abstracts, they would also notice that growth hormone therapy can in improved upon by combining the injected growth hormone with another type known as gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogs (GnRHa). From the 5th source…

“…the combination of GH and GnRHa is significantly more effective in improving adult height than GH alone in girls with idiopathic short stature, early or normal onset of puberty…”

The values for final height increase is very noticeable.

• With GH alone – around 6 cms
• With GH and GnRHa together – around 10 cms

The amount of GH & GnRHa used is around 100 microg/kg or 10 g/L (for the GH standard dosage). The dosages were given around every 2 weeks for years, usually a 3-5 year range until the child is getting close to full bone maturity, which is when over 1 years time, their height increased only 1 cm or less with the bone age (BA) usually over 15 years of age.

The first paper was insightful in showing just how much more growth can be achieved by a child who is given the treatment over a controlled group without the therapy. On average, the increased growth was about 1 extra inch of height increase every year. On average, the total extra height gained was 2-2.5 inches of extra adult height from using the growth hormones. When the cost is calculated out, it is shown that extra inch of height gained from therapy is actually around an extra $35,000 each time.

However there are studies which seem to show that for these kids, the therapy does not mean that they will be able to push past what their body was genetically programmed to reach. The 3rd study seems to conclude with the opposite point.

The study concluded with “…We conclude that combined rhGH and GnRH analogue therapy in short adolescents with normally timed puberty does not contribute to increase their final height above their pretreatment predicted adult height…”

Some height increase researchers have argued citing research done like the study above that it is not that everyone will end up taller from getting excess GH release, but that only people who are already suffering from the genetic pathology of having the growth hormone deficiency disorder will have their height increased. The deficiency may not just be about growth hormones but other types. It would also include certain types of disorders that result in short stature like Turner’s Syndrome and IUGR.

I actually have to disagree with their point when we see what happens to people like Tanya Angus or Sultan Kosen. If the GH is not making these people taller from the pituitary gland suffering hyperplasia, then what is causing them to get taller?

We can see from Angus’s case that before she was suffering from the metastasizing pituitary tumor, she was already at a respectable 5′ 8″ tall, a good height to be at for the average statured American female. From an endocrinological point of view, she was not suffering from any type of growth retardation endocrine diseases when her abnormal grow started when she was around the age of 18. It was clear that she never suffered from any type of growth hormone deficiency. When her tumor pushed the pituitary gland into hyperplasia, GH was increased over 10X, and she grew. If a person who does not suffer from growth hormone deficiency develops a pituitary tumor, no matter how much the tumor is causing excess GH release, they should not be increasing in height, only maybe muscle mass and increased energy, since it is seen that GH is also touted as the hormone that is supposed to be good for anti-aging and age reversal properties.

However Tanya Angus did get taller around the age of 18, from the height of 5′ 8″ and her tumor kept pushing GH throughout her body.

It would be easy to rebuttal the conclusion of the last study with another study…

• Effects of combined gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonist and growth hormone therapy on adult height in precocious puberty: a further contribution.

This study noticed that for girls who don’t have growth hormone deficiencies but do notice precocious puberty, their height was increased up to 12 cms if they used a combination of growth hormones and GnRHa

Then again new findings like “High dose growth hormone treatment induces acceleration of skeletal maturation and an earlier onset of puberty in children with idiopathic short stature.” seem to shift the overall physician’s opinion back to the idea that maybe GH treatment is not as good as we think…

“…Long term growth hormone (GH) treatment in children with idiopathic short stature (ISS) results in a relatively small mean gain in final height of 3-9 cm, which may not justify the cost of treatment. As it is unknown whether GH treatment during puberty adds to final height gain…”

There is a gain, but the gain is around 1-3.5 inches in extra height. Is the height increase really worth that much money they ask? It would seem that if the child gets the GH therapy for too long, the bone age and bone maturity can be advanced so far that it can cause precocious puberty, meaning the amount of time left to grow is decrease.

Some articles are actually agreeing with this idea like “High-dose GH treatment limited to the prepubertal period in young children with idiopathic short stature does not increase adult height” confirm this new opinion. It seems that compared to controls, the GH therapy doesn’t really make the final adult height increase a lot, especially when the therapy is taken off. It would seem that the growth rate actually decreases to below average if the growth hormone is stopped being added.

So now I am fully confused. Does growth hormone help shorter kids really end up taller than if they didn’t use the therapy, or is the increase so little that the cost of the treatment is just not worth it?

The 3rd study seems to make a good overall conclusion about the results. “…We and others have demonstrated a clear increase in their growth velocity short term, but improvement of their final height remains unclear and controversial” The thing to really take away from this post is that maybe the GH and GnRHa is only good for the first few years, but then have no effect towards increased longitudinal growth of the bones, meaning that the overall final adult height is not really increased that much, if at all.

The entire point of all 5 studies can be summarized by the conclusion made in the 2nd study by the Genentech Collaborative Group which was published in 1999…

“Long-term administration of growth hormone to children with idiopathic short stature can increase adult height to a level above the predicted adult height and above the adult height of untreated historical control children.”

As for other applications and whether the growth hormone therapy would work to cure other causes for idiopathic short stature, there has been studies that say that they can. These include

• hypophosphatemic rickets
• osteogenesis imperfecta
• intrauterine growth retardation (IUGR)
• Turner’s syndrome

For some of these disorders, the increase in height can be as dramatic as 12 cms (or almost 5 inches!)

Something that I finally have found evidence for and many height increase researchers have suspected have turned out to be true from recent research.

A finding in a Pubmed article “On vertebral body growth.” reveals a piece of information that most professional physicians would know but most amateur height increase researchers might not know is…

“…Unlike other long bones of the skeleton, vertebral body epiphyses never ossify, and after the end of the growth period of life they are reduced into thin plates of hyaline cartilage which are situated between vertebral body and intervertebral disc….”

I always thought that there was some layer of cartilage left from the ossification process of the normal bone development process and it seems that we might all be right about it. After typing the phrase “Intervertebral Disk Cartilage” into google, I found even more evident that there are cartilage in adult human vertebrate bones

From a webpage of a sort of advanced Biology or Anatomy Medical School course entitled “ANAT D502 – Basic Histology – Cartilage, Bone & Joints, Bone Formation Pre-Lab – revised 9.23.12″ which is from Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis.

Something to notice is that there is supposed to be layers of hyaline cartilage surrounding the nucleus pulposis and anulus fibrosis.

While the intervertebral disk consists of only the…

1. Anulus Fibrosis
2. Nucleus pulposis

The two layers surrounding the intervertebral disks and are in the juntion between the disks and the vertebral bone are where the hyaline cartilage are supposed to be. The entire thing is called intervertebral symphysis. I would guess that the layer of hyaline cartilage is made much bigger to be used in the diagram but it should be there in adult humans.

Another PubMed article “Morphology of the cartilaginous endplates in human intervertebral disks with ultrashort echo time MR imaging.”

It definitely suggest that at the ends of the disks are these surfaces of the bone which are covered in cartilage, just like how the ends of a long bone, (ie femur) have a layer of articular covering them. More images show the same, thing although it is never explicitly stated that the diagrams are for adults. we know that in children who are still growing, there has to be some sort of endplate which acts like a growth plate. I am suggesting that the diagrams are for adults, which would give us hope.

While this is sort of exciting, potentially good news, it is important to always be cautious in being too over-optimistic. I would refer to the study “Articular cartilage and intervertebral disc proteoglycans differ in structure: An electron microscopic study”

Abstract

I will probably have to remove the Supplement Guide section for chemicals, compounds, or supplements which I thought would allow for the person to grow taller after this post since the whole point of this post is to refute all the possible vitamins and supplements I did list in the Supplement Guide as something that could potentially help people grow taller after growth plate closure.

Here is something I wanted to say for a long time since I have noticed that every month, there is a new pill, herbal formulation, or miracle drug being sold on the internet which is supposed to help people who are already adults with completely closed growth plates grow. I have reviewed so many of the pills, including Gloxi Height Enhancer, MFIII, GrowthMax Plus, Elevate GH, Baryca Carbonica, Slicea, etc. I am really tired of doing the reviews and sort of running out of patience.

Everyone of these supplements have shown no promise, at least for the person with fully close plates. The only two supplements which i still think might lead to a very little bit of increased height from increasing synovial joint volume in the knees have been glucosamine sulfate and hyaluronic acid since they are both proteoglycans and glycoaminoglycans which can be found in the extracellular matrix of the synovial knee. If we can add more content in the matrix, that might theoretically give the lubricated liquid inside the gap extra space. meaning when a person stands up there is less height loss from compression by the upper body.

However even these supplements have a low level of working.

The main problem with any pill that claims to work is always the fact that the pill would have to have at least two major effects and not at the same time.

1. One step would be to somehow remove the hard inorganic, nonliving tissue between the bone cells (osteocytes) and lacunae in the extracellular matrix of the bones. 

2. The second step would be to be able to cause only chondrogenesis (to create cartilage) to occur in the area which lost the inorganic nonliving tissue. 

These may be the two major steps but there are at least 4 major considerations any inventor would have to take into account if they were to create some pill that really worked.

Consideration #1: They would have to be able to not get ingested by the stomach when going through the person’s digestive system. The stomach has hydrochloric acid which can burn holes through steel so any compound that is swallowed would first have to not get broken down by the stomach juices and acids.

Consideration #2: They would also have to be small, safe, or non threatening enough that the host’s immune system and white blood cells would not find them and decide that they are some foreign invader and try to rip the component to pieces. Not just white blood cells, but proteins throughout the body will all be fighting it to prevent infections and inflammations.

Consideration #3:  The effect the swallowed substances would work on have to be very specific and work locally. If we did find a pill that can de-ossify the bone and remove the hard inorganic material, it would work on our entire body turning us into a puddle of rubber or skin tissue lying on the ground. The pill or supplement must be able to target the areas of the body where the old growth plates used to be.

Since the region of long bones where the old growth plates cartilage used to be has no type of easy to identifying marker, this step would be very hard. Being able to target only certain areas of the body is much easier to do using needles, shots, and injections than the holistic way pills are used, which dispers out and diffuse throughout the body after they do get into the blood stream.

Consideration #4: If the pill can remove the hydroxyapatites, how would the calcium mineral deposits be removed in an orderly fashion so that chondrogenesis can immediately begin. Let’s remember that the whole growth plate has at least 4 major process going on simultaneously in a very steady state, continuous fashion with one process occurring right after the other, sort of like how in the Olympics you see in the 4 person relays where one person who finishes running passes the baton to the person after them right when they cross the finish line.

Consideration #5: Let’s say that we do manage to replace the bone material with the cartilage material, which is much more elastic and easy to work with in terms of tensile loading. How would we be able to align the few chondrocytes that are made to not only multiply to a high enough number so that they would have some type of overall morphological effect on the cartilage they are embedded in , but also to align themselves so that they are stacking in the columns seen in normal  growth plates.

The truth is that I have left out at least a few other major considerations which I have currently forgotten but this is just showing that there is probably never going to be any type of 1 kind pill or supplement which we can swallow and make us taller as adults. That desire is wishful thinking.

If I was to guess, if we do ever find any kind of alternative to limb lengthening surgery in term sof ingesting some type of “pill” it would have to be very resistant from the body’s natural immunogical defenses, have to be able to two two process simultaneously while also doing them sequentially. Then it would have to be able to direct cells and extracellular matrix to the right direction i movement and the right alignment for the cells that are created.

At this point, there is no pill that comes even close to doing any of these things. The medical field is still very young and we can’t even find a miracle cure for some easy like high cholesterol or blood pressure. The cure for short stature may not come about for decades, if not centuries and it might come in the form of a nano scale sized organic, but intelligent robot.