Someone today left a comment on the website linking to a guy named Lee Lazelle from the UK who had a DailyMail UK article entitled I Can’t Stop Growing written about him back in 2001 saying that even at the age of 30 he was still growing at a rate of 1 inch per year.

Now he would be  42 years old. Someone did ask what happened to this guy (source) who was said to have some type of incurable condition which makes him not have the ability to stop growing. If he kept up that rate of 1 inch per year, and after 12 year later, since 2001 to the current 2013, he would be 8 feet 3 inches now, a serious contender for the world’s tallest man.

This guy is clearly visible from being so tall, and if he did grow to anywhere close to the tallest man in the UK record, which stands at 7′ 7″ – 7′ 8″ right now, he would have been noticed buy anyone who saw him and the Guinness Records people would have found him, or at least a few new channels would have done at least another story about this guy.

I think the overall conclusion is that Lazelle did actually stop growing and if I was to guess, he ended up with a height around 7′ 4″- 7′ 5″. There is no more information on this British guy that I found anywhere else from doing a quick google search on his name.

The reason why I give this guy another 1-2 inches of his reported height back in 2001 is actually based on the height/ growth pattern seen in Yao Ming, another giant. China’s past record on falsifying their Olympic athletes’ ages aside, lets assume that Yao Ming’s real age reported when he was drafted as #1 to the Houston Rockets back in 2002 was true. Currently Yao is 32 years old. He was born in Sep of 1980. Back in June of 2002 when he was drafted, he would have been almost 22 years old. Yao’s growth pattern shows that over the span of the last 2-3 years of his growth, he averaged about 1 inch of extra growth each year. In the 2000 Olympics Yao was first noticed and his height looked to be around 7′ 4″ – 7′ 5″.

Most males stop growing taller around the age of 18-20. Yao’s genetics meant that he probably had another couple of extra years of open growth plates. He was listed at 7′ 5″ when he came into the league but his height was elevated another 1 inch around the end of his NBA career to 7′ 6″. There is only anecdotal stories and evidence that Yao grew taller by 0.5 inch from the age of 21 when he got drafted to maybe 22-23 when he supposedly stopped growing taller.

I am going to try to take the growth progress of Yao and transpose it to the growth of this british guy and this is why I say that he grew at most 2 inches. The other thing to recognize is that this guy had severe bone pain in his body. It seemed that he was suffering from arthritis, which is a symptom in mainly people who are much older. If I was to guess at his condition, it seems that he went through an accelerated rate of growth earlier in life. My guess is that this guy suffers from a similar condition like that of Zech Devits. I wrote a post about the connection between Zech Devits, Matt McGrory, and Siah Khan in the post The Connection Between Matt McGrory, Siah Khan, Zech Devits, And The Tallest Filipino Leads To Proteus Syndrome And Much More (Important!)

The bone pains is NOT from growing longitudinally in the bones. This is what most people would think is the pain but it is not. People who experience growing pains usually are the type who grow 8-10 inches a year, not the type of person who grows only 1 inch a year. His pain is coming from a result where he is said to not even be able to hold onto a cup from hand cramping. Hand cramps can come from either from muscle problems or joint problems. It could be that he could not send the electrical signal to tell the muscle in his hands to close down on a cup. I would guess the better reason is that the joints in his hands could not move in the right way without pain. The joints became locked and stiff. This signals the onset of rheumatoid arthritis, where he is lossing articular cartilage in the synovial joints of his hands. This is the same things as what happened to Zech Devits. Devits also had extreme problems with bone pain and advanced aging of his bones.

So why do I think that Lazelle stopped growing?

I refer to the PubMed article Fundamental limits on longitudinal bone growth: growth plate senescence and epiphyseal fusion. The study/ article shows that at least one of the primary reasons why humans stop growing is due to simple physics and mathematical principles. Over time, the number of cells/chondrocytes that are possible to be used for hypertrophy slowly drops and there is only 1 inevitable ending, where all the cells are used up.

There is one other possibility on how it is possible that this Lee Lazelle guy could have grown. This is if he had a serious problem where the chondrocytes in his growth plates did not have the estrogen receptors, either alpha or beta. There have been three studies written and posted in the PubMed database which show this type of medical disorder where it really is possible for the person who has it to still be growing. It is due to the fact that the cartilage in the long bones have not been able to go through the chondro-osteogenic process yet.

I wrote a post The 3 Men Who Lacked Estrogen Receptors Who Did Not Stop Growing to show that it is possible.

However for the 2 cases of men who were around 6′ 8″ around the 30 years old range and still had open growth plates, the main negativity that resulted from their disorder was that they were sterile and could not have children. However the article on Lee Lazelle showed that he had a 12 year old daughter back in 2001. If this guy had a daughter when he was 18 years old (he was 30 years old when the article was written) then he clearly did not have any problems with child bearing, so he was not sterile like the medically documented cases.

The thing about having the estrogen receptors being inactive or gone in the other cases showed that it would have been close to impossible to have children. This shows that Lee Lazelle did NOT have the problem where he was suffering from the same condition, where his growth plates could not close due to him lacking the receptors or the receptors not functioning.

He was a normal guy going through the normal endochondral ossification process. He just happened to have growth plates that stayed around a lot longer than average, just like Kosen and Angus. So why did his growth plates stay around even at the age of 30?

It was due to another endocrine system mechanism which I do not know of right now, although I suspect that it happens to a lot of people who have pituitary adenoma. Kosen was said to be around when he grew again another 2 inches. Angus grew until she was around 29 years old, when the weight on her body caused the vertebrate to curve, reducing overall height and removing any phenotypical evidence that excess GH in her body resulted in adult stage height increase, even if it did happen.

So did this Lazelle continue to grow taller even after being in his 30s? No, he stopped growing.

However, the most interesting thing for us researchers is to find out what mechanism or endocrine process could have caused his body to be able to prevent full growth plate closure until he was in his 30s. That would be a very helpful thing to know.