Specific Bones Do Grow Bigger After Skeletal Maturity And Growth Plate Closure

I believe that even in our normal day to day life most people would be able to observe from being around a person who is going through the puberty phases in life changes to their body occurring which suggest bones are growing bigger as well.

Of course, we are not just talking about the interstitial growth of bones here. What were are saying is that there are certain bones in the human body which keep on growing in size even after all the growth plates are closed.

The evidence is from certain studies, like…

Surprising evidence of pelvic growth (widening) after skeletal maturity

It seems that while the long bones may no longer be growing vertically, they do indeed grow in width.

Of course, we already know that the long bones grows appositionally thicker over the years as the inner cambium periosteum layer deposits more and more osteoblasts onto the bones, but this is different. What we are see is an irregular bone structure, the pelvic bone becoming wider.

This makes sense due to two main things…

Factor #1: Many females have said that after going through with pregnancy and having their babies the natural way, they noticed that their hips expanded in size, and have never gotten back down to the size before they were ever pregnant. The phenomena tells us that somehow during pregnancy the pelvic bones were expanded in width.

Factor #2: The most common phenomena where the shoulders of a young teenage boy after they finish growing taller seems to grow in width and the overall torso seems to also grow wider, aka “filling out”

It would turn out after looking at the locations of cartilage in the body, the sternum/rib cage area of the body even in young teenage boys who have no more cartilage to grow taller, there is still cartilage in their front ribcage area. That is what makes the males grow wider in the shoulder area around the ages of 17-25.

Remember: When archeaologists are digging up cities from thousands back, they find skeletons with the entire ribcage being bones, which suggests that sometime after the bones that make height are bones, the ribcage which is made from fibrocartilage also slowly ossifies over time. If humans had cartilage in the front that never ossified, then the dug up skeleton from thousands of years ago would be missing the front area/sternum which is supposed to be surrounded by Costal Cartilage. Cartilage does not survive buried under ground for thousands of years. It either ossifies or gets disintegrated.

So what we are seeing is two different areas of the body that are still growing!

1. The rib cage
2. The pelvic region

In my long post about the possible reason for why some pregnant women grew taller, I had pointed at the related phenomena of pelvic girdle pain, where the little bit of cartilage (at the Symphysis Pubis) becomes stretched out, making the entire pelvic bone wider. After the findings on the ligament stretching and relaxing effects of relaxin, which is also released during pregnancy, it started to made sense. For example, the pelvic structure of females and males are already different. On average, the hips of a woman’s is proportionally larger than a mans, for childbirth and for easier passage of the baby through the birth canal.

During pregnancy, the entire area becomes widened from relaxin & the drop in calcium levels in the lumbar bones in the mother as the calcium gets transported to the developing embryo in the uterus, which means the bones become widened aka bigger. The loss in Ca means that the bones do get much weaker which means that it might be easier to stretch out the bones and remodel them.

There is now medical confirmation that certain bones in the body do keep getting bigger volumetrically. Refer to the following below…

• [Do the obstetrically relevant bony pelvic measurements change? A retrospective analysis of computed tomographic pelvic x-rays]
• Bone and body segment lengthening and widening: a 7-year follow-up study in pubertal girls.

From the 2nd source, it is written the following….

“By the age of 18 years the girls had reached their mothers’ height (101%) and humerus, radius, femur and tibia lengths (100-101%), but not their mothers’ shoulder, great pelvis and lesser pelvis widths (98%, 95% and 93%, respectively). Our data confirmed that, after bone elongation had ceased, segment width continued to increase, although at a slower speed, into early adulthood.“

If the pelvic bones are getting bigger, aka wider, how can we then use that type of knowledge to make the overall skeleton longer then?