At this point in the research I would have to say that the prospect of being able to figure out a way to make a human body start to grow vertically again is actually very challenging. From doing more reading and achieving a better understanding on how the microscopic mechanisms and physiology of the growth plates, bones, and cartilage really work, I would say that I am starting to lean towards the side of most professional physicians and growth specialists in that there is no simple, easy to perform non-invasive way to make the body grow taller.
That however does NOT mean that we should give up toward figuring out an idea that would be better towards getting taller in a faster, less painful, less time consuming way. I would like to point out the fact that it wasn’t until the 1990s, just 20 years ago that physicians in the USA and the western nations like Great Britian, France, Germany realized that the idea of being able to slowly distract and pull human bones apart safely was even possible. The famous Gavriil Ilizarov spent 30 years studying in the former USSR perfecting his external fiaxtor method before he presented his finding in the late 1980s to the rest of the world. Even in the 90s most orthopedic surgeon’s did not know that lengthening of the bones was even possible without severe surgical complications. His legacy can be seen these days in Kurgan, Russia where there is a famous orthopedic surgery clinic named after him as well as his own statue, where he is depicted holding his famous external fixators. For more information about Gavriil Ilizarov, refer to the Wikipedia article on him
The research is reaching a plateau and the really detailed ways and process on how the signaling pathway in a growth plate really work is not even half understood. This means that we really don’t know how the growth plate cartilages in the human body really work at the finer details level.
There is one way that is absolutely sure to work, and that is to break the long bones that make up part of the overall height and then pull the two parts of the broken bone apart as the non-union is going through the healing process. This break is known by the general term Distraction Osteogenesis as well as the terms Callotasis or Callus Distraction. Refer to the studies and articles below…
- Study #1: Limb lengthening by callus distraction (callotasis).
- Study #2: The callotasis method of limb lengthening.
From the 2nd study…
“…Callotasis is a lengthening technique that involves slow, controlled distraction after subperiosteal-submetaphyseal osteotomy”
- Distraction is another term that being pulled apart.
- Subperiosteal means situated or occurring beneath the periosteum, which is the layer of bone cells that surrounds the main bone layering.
- Metaphyseal (or the Metaphysis) means the growing part of a long bone between the diaphysis and the epiphysis
- Sub-Metaphyseal means going underneath or beneath the layer of the boen area known as metaphysis or metaphyseal.
- Osteotomy means cutting the bone which is not from some accidental fracture but due to a precise intentional surgical cut.
The break is not actually through the entire bone as is believed by some journalists who report on the surgery and say that people’s legs are sawed in half to make them grow taller. That is not completely true. All that is really needed is to break through the harder bone type, the cortical bone type for a chance to pull the bones apart. The trabecular bones themselves do have strength in themselves but they are much weaker. When the external fixators (or internal fixators) that is fixed onto the rods that are drilled through the limb is then pulled in a tensile direction, the trabecular bones will give way under the metal pulling which is how the bones are actually lengthened. Trabecular bones have a much higher porosity than cortical bones and have around only a fraction of the resistance towards plastic deformation.
The bones have a certain ability to start healing at a dramatic rate and the way that is done is through the flow of blood, marrow, and adult type stem cells to the region forming a cartilage-bone matrix material that is known as fibrocartilage, which will eventually turn into bone. The clogging nature of the mixture forms a emulsion-like coagulation known as the callus.
The other idea is what has been proposed for over 6 years on the Height Quest blog/website created by Tyler. He calls the method Lateral Synovial Joint Loading.
It would be easy to dismiss someone like Tyler as a quack or another internet marketer trying to sell a useless product but after 6 years of doing dedicated research and stating that he has grown upwards of 4 cms of height from applying the method as well as at least 3 other people claiming to gain a sizable height increase, the method can not be easily dismissed away. If he is a scam artist, he is one very dedicated scam artist in doing so much research, some of which has been rather enlightening.
Refer to the two posts I wrote months ago about how to do the technique for more details
- Post #1: A Simple Step By Step Guide For Lateral Synovial Joint Loading
- Post #2: Lateral Synovial Joint Loading Explained In Simple English
Or you can just read the original source which I created the posts/guides around…
The entire method is basically a leap of faith on the efficacy over the idea of a biomedical technique performed on lab animals (mice) by a group of University Professors and Grad Students. This group in the biomedical engineering department at the University of Indiana did the experiments headed by two people…
- Hiroki Yokota –Website
- Ping Zhang – Website not found (or was taken down)
The two main studies that the entire technique is based on are…
- Study #1: Elbow loading promotes longitudinal bone growth of the ulna and the humerus
- Study #2: Lengthening of mouse hindlimbs with joint loading.
I don’t know whether this idea will ever catch on but it seems that there is a small group of researchers and experimenters who are trying it out taking around 10 minutes out of each day for up to a few years to see if there are any results.
This leaves actually only one other idea that has been shown to possibly work, but only at the theoretical level at this point. That is the idea of using the two areas of biomedical engineering of stem cell technology and tissue engineering to create functional growth plates which will eventually be implanted back into the adult human’s leg bone to start growth again. Of course, this idea will also require invasive surgery.
- Area #1: Stem Cell Research & Stem Cell Technology
- Area #2: Tissue Engineering, or more specifically Tissue Regenerative Medicine
These two areas of study are intertwined in many ways. All that we are trying to do is to regenerate a type of tissue that would cause bone tissue to expand volumetrically. That required cartilage tissue. So we are trying to make cartilage form. From multiple researchers over many decades, the overall conclusion reached is that due to the way the extracellular matrix in cartilage tissue works and how low in concentration the chondrocytes are in the cartilage, cartilage tissue is very hard to form at a fast proliferative rate.
From Source 1 “…Unlike bone and all other connective tissue types, cartilage is avascular, lacking blood vessels. For this reason alone, cartilage does not possess the regenerative capacity of bone or the other connective tissue types. Remember, nutrient delivery is essential for tissue repair. Blood vessels provide the nutrient delivery to most tissues.”
The best example is in the articualr cartilage seen in the knees and hips of older people. Over the years, from pounding and shocks from walking, the articular cartilage layer in the joints decrease in thickness, and eventually the layer is rubbed (or compressed) away leading to bone touching bone, causing the nerve endings in the joint area to signal pain signals to the brain. That cartilage layering is very hard to get back. Right now there are some proposed ideas on how to make the cartilage layer thicker.
So the main idea I am proposing in this post is that besides the ideas of callotasis and the scientific unproven (and experimental unproven at least on a high consistent level) loading of the lateral ends of long bone epiphysis, the last major idea that is reasonable to do at this point in technology is to create growth plates from scratch.
The Basic Science
From basic tissue engineering principles, we first need some type of cells from the subject or patient to start out with. This means that a possible biopsy is first done, more specifically a Bone Marrow Biopsy. Refer to the link on MedlinePlus for more information about Bone Marrow Biopsy.
From basic stem cell principles, we can’t just scrape the inner check of the subject to get ordinary cells. We need the stem cells because they still have a chance to change into the right type of cells we need in the beginning. We need stem cells to start out with, or at least the precursors to both the bone cells and the precursors to the cartilage cells.
In the study “Engineering Growing Tissues” which I would cite as the main reason I wrote the post “Engineering Growing Cartilage Tissue In Vivo Through Chondrocyte Transplantation (Big Breakthrough!)”, it was shown that to see from histological examination the phenomenon of actual bone tissue growing in size aka volumetrically, we would need both bone AND cartilage cells to begin with, not just cartilage cells or precursor (progenitor) cartilage cells.
Side Note: Theoretically we could just take a swab of the epithelial cells in the inner cheek of the subject and using the process of transdifferentiation turn them into the cartilage cells or stem cells needed to start the tissue engineering regeneration but the process of cell-cell transdifferentiation is just not well understood at this time. Currently the cell process of transdifferentiation has not even begun to be figured out yet so there is no way that we can figure out how to manipulate a fully differentiated cell to dedifferentiate back to its precursor form or into a another cell type. I would guess that it has to do with something in the microRNA of each cell, but it would require real professional researchers to figure that out. That could take many decades for anything to pan out.
Something I have been wondering is whether it is possible to just start out with not a pregenitor cell like a stem cell, but just some chondrocytes or cartilage taken from the subject’s/patient/s body. The easiest place I would guess is from the nose, or ears. The simplest idea would be to puncture a small hole in the earlobe to grab a piece of ear cartilage. However the type of cartilage that is found in the ear or nose may not have the right collagen type of chondrocyte concentration. It might be better to just take the cartilage sample, and then using chemical filtration techniques or purification techniques, separate using bioseparation principles the chondrocytes from the cartilage matrix.
So we need to get either of 3 types of cell types to start with from the subject…
- Stem Cells – Most likely way is using bone marrow biospy, which is EXTREMELY painful
- Progenitor cells – for Both the cartilage and bones cell types
- Cartilage and Bone cells – Bone biopsy and clpping an ear or nose
Since stem cells are technical progenitor cells for all tissue types, it just makes sense that we go with a bone marrow biopsy to get the needed adult human stem cells in the beginning. I am not sure if the idea of using already differentiated, mature chondrocytes and osteoblasts would even work from the studies I have read, but it is a long shot.
From the marrow derived sample, we have to filter and purify the sample, removing the plasma, red blood cells, white blood cells, and whatever else is in the marrow from the stem cells.
These stem cells are not as powerful in their potential as say from the umbilical cord of a newborn baby or fetus, but they should be good enough. They are what some people call yellow in nature.
From the Wikipedia article on Adipose Tissue….
“…Recent advances in biotechnology have allowed for the harvesting of adult stem cells from adipose tissue, allowing stimulation of tissue regrowth using a patient’s own cells. In addition, adipose-derived stem cells from both human and animals reportedly can be efficiently reprogrammed into induced pluripotent stem cells without the need for feeder cells. The use of a patient’s own cells reduces the chance of tissue rejection and avoids ethical issues associated with the use of human embryonic stem cells.”The issue of tissue rejection is something that is also needed to be addressed for any type of implantation, explantation, or transplantation to work. The human body has its own natural resistance and defense system against foreign contaminants.
From the adult adipose derived stem cells (ASCs), we can get them into a type of medium, usually calf serum to help them grow and multiple in number. This is the proliferation stage.
Update June 21, 2013: It seems that my understanding of stem cells is somewhat wrong. I mistakenly believed that adipose derived stem cells and bone marrow stem cells are the same thing when new sources have come out to show that they are two different types of stem cells in adult humans. This post/article will need to be eventually rewritten to make the clear distinction between the adipose-derived stem cells (ASCs or ADSCs) and the bone marrow stem cells (MSCs or BDSCs). I will be reading over the studies…
I personally would say that it is better to take the stem cells from the bone marrow for our tissue engineering applications.
Once we have been able to get the stem cells to start differentiating into both the bone tissue cells and cartilage tissue cells that we want (because we want to have BOTH), we take the needed amount of concentration of cells, and embedd them into a scaffold. The scaffold is needed to act as a temporary holding structure for the cells to attach themselves to while they are still going through the proliferation stage.
The last major piece is the addition of certain types of growth factors to stimulate the bone and cartilage cells to start. At this stage, the best candidates I have found in research for the highest chondrogenic potential are a combination of TGF-Beta2 with BMP-7, and also the addition of GDF-5.
The scaffold with the growth factor mixture and the grown cell culture is what will be surgically implanted into the human body and let to naturally grow in vivo.
The result is the biotechnology of reinitiating the human body to grow taller again from getting a new growth plate added in. This is the idea on how to grow taller using stem cells technology and tissue engineering regenerative medicine.
Things To Consider
This method will require the need to do a major surgical process. However, once the implant manages to fuse and be functional in parallel with the rest of the human bone, it will mean that we have been to get the human body to grow taller using new growth plates.
I don’t know just how far biotechnology will advance in the next 50 years. Some people have said that the 21st century will be the century of Biology and Breakthrough Biotechnology and Medicine from understanding Genetics and maybe there is still new fields and areas of medical study that has not even been invented yet. However at this point, this is what I think will be the best viable option for real continued height increase starting at the point of adulthood and bone maturity.
The idea of using stem cells and tissue engineering together to grow completely functional growth plates which can be implanted into the adult human body to make them grow taller again is not the dream that so many height increase seekers wish for but it is based on hard scientific fact and research. There are many studies showing how well stem cells work in growing tissues. There are many journalists who are claiming that one day tissuing engineering will be so advances that we will be able to replace individual organs and tissue parts like our body was a car.
I don’t want to focus on science fiction or make grand claims. This is what is possible, and I think this may be the other really big idea that will be here within a couple of decades helping people continue to grow taller when their first set of growth plates are gone.
I wud like to be a person willingly helping to bestowing my body for experimentation in the process to make people taller thro stem cell research. Hope to hear from you dear.