Articular Cartilage At The End Of Epiphysis Do Growth Thicker Making Bones Longer

I realize that these days I post so little but when I find something very interesting I still make a really good post. This news might really give you guys so really good hope!

So recently I stopped by a large bookstore in the Gangnam area of Seoul. I had casually mentioned to my girlfriend that I do a lot of medical research and flirted with the idea of maybe one day going to medical school, just for the experience of challenging my intellect. She seemed to be very attracted to the idea of her potential future husband possibly being a doctor and really nudged me towards getting a book that all medical students read, which is a standard anatomy & physiology book. So I scoured the bookshelves looking for something reasonably priced and picked up the a University Level Biology Book “Seeley’s Anatomy & Physiology, 9th Ed. (International Student Edition)“. You can see my iphone picture of it to the right.

I decided to peruse through the book to see what they had to say about the epiphyseal growth plate cartilage and how the bones in the body grow. I am already very familiar with how the long bones go through periosteal bone growth, appositional growth, longitudinal growth, and endochondral ossification. However there was a very interesting section which really jumped out at me. On page 186 of the textbook, right underneath a diagram showing the standard defined zones of the epiphyseal plate, there was just 1 paragraph dedicated to the fact that the articular cartilages at the end of bones, long and short, seem to contribute to the volumetric size of the bone!

I took the liberty to take a picture of the section and pasted it below…

I am not sure whether the reader can read what the section says but here are the main points on the paragraph…

1. The epiphysis does increase in volumetric size from growth of the articular cartilage.

2. Articular cartilage increase the size of bones without even an epiphysis

3. How the articular cartilage makes the bones around it grow in size is similar to how longitudinal growth in the normal growth plates are done.

4. It seems that the chondrocyte columns that is easily seen in any histological examination of the epiphyseal growth plates also exists in the articular cartilage, but they are not as ‘obvious’, whatever that means.

5. It seems that the chondrocytes which are on the surface of the articular cartilage is just like the mesenchymal stem cells which are the progenitor cells which differentiate into the chondrogenic lineage found in the resting zone of the growth plates.

6. When the epiphysis reaches what is supposed to be a maximum size (whatever that may be), the articular cartilage seems to stop its appositional-like growth.

What this proves is that apparently the articular cartilage does contribute to the length of long bones by making the ends of the long bones, the epiphysis larger in size!

They do this just like growth plates.

So the obvious questions to ask then is…

1. Why does the epiphyseal cartilage disappear while the articular cartilage stays for life?

2. Why does the articular cartilage stop producing more bone underneath it after a certain age?

3. Shouldn’t the articular cartilage still have some bit of chondrocytes in it in column-like alignment which could possibly start to hypertrophize and make the bones slightly (1-2 mm) longer?

Answer to Question #1: We answered the first question in an older post Why Does The Epiphyseal Cartilage Disappear But The Articular Cartilage Remain? (Breakthrough!). The answer is that articular cartilage has the SOX9 gene activation the SOX9 Protein and the presence of the Chondromodulin Type 1.

Answer to Question #2: I am going to propose a very good guess on this. When I wrote the post on the analysis of deer antlers Increase Height And Grow Taller From Deer Antler Regeneration Principles, and how they grow biannually, we saw that the structure at the very tip of the deer antler had a mesenchyme reservoir. This is what I would guess the articular cartilage sort of has. The human body has a limited number of mesenchyme close to the surface of the articular cartilage which will slowly over time differentiate into chondroblasts, and then into chondrocytes, and sort of align themselves in some type of columnar fashion.

When the human being reaches past a certain age, the mesenchyme reservoir gets completely used up. There is nothing left.

Answer to Question #3: I think that there is not enough chondrocytes or mesenchyme left on the inner size of the articular cartilage surface. There might be a few, and there might be ways to get the chondrocytes to hypertrophize, but there is just not enough and there is no way to get the few left to organize themselves in column fashion.

Conclusion:

This new discovery is very, VERY Promising. If the articular cartilage, which is supposed to always exist throughout life, except for maybe certain arthritic cases, does make any type of contribution towards the overall length of long bones, then we have many tools (growth factors like BMP-7 and chondrocyte aligning and regulation signalling factors like thyroxine) already to possibly alter it in certain minimally invasive approaches to get it to start to thicken again and get chondrocytes to multiple in the cartilage.

If we can make the surface of the articular cartilage get some extra mesenchyme, which I theorize is how it originally contributes to the overall size of the epiphysis, then it will start to thicken again, and the chondrocytes on the surface will slowly seep down by diffusion through the cartilage extracellular matrix of Glygoaminoglycans, Proteoglycans, and Collagen Type II, until they form columns. Eventually the diffusion rate of the chondrocytes will slow down, and the chondrocytes will start to form into column-like shapes. I imagine it like how rain water droplets fall slowly into molasses, and the droplets eventually go back into the spherical form due to maximization of the strength of the Force of the Surface Tension. The rain droplets gets trapped at some level, and the result are rain droplets/ chondrocytes stacking along top of each other…

Just look at the picture I took from page 189 of the same textbook. See how the shape and location of the articular cartilage is almost flat and looks very much like half of a full growth plate. It does not enclose around half of the entire epiphysis like it is drawn in some medical school anatomy textbooks. It just sits on the top of the bone. And this is for an adult bone!

So all that we have to do to get the articular cartilage to start to deposit bone tissue on the cortical bone layer below it is to get more mesenchyme above it! Of course the obvious joint we are talking about is the knee joint, which is a synovial joint.

The knee synovial joint is mainly filled with types of compounds, hyaluronan, and aggrecan, with some Collagen added in. We know that taking supplements of Glucosamine Sulfate around 1500 mg does seem to make the knees feel better.

The cheapest way to possibly grease up the surface of the articular cartilage would be to take those glucosamin sulfate at 1500 mg twice a day, for upwards of 3 months. The added collagenous material could possibly cause the cartilage to get slightly thicker. From This Link Here, a guy named Greg Bailey from Australia back in Sept 2010 stated that he grew from 5′ 10″ all of his adult life to almost 6 feet tall in his 50s from taking Glucosamine. See the picture to the right…

This is not the only case where ingesting Glucosamine Sulphate seemed to make people grow taller. There is a very famous article written by a person named Jennifer Hope (Hope???) entitled “Can a pill make you taller in four weeks?” which also stated that taking Glucosamine Sulfate at 1500 mg daily for around 1 month will make you around 2-4 mm taller.

Buy the Glucosamine Sulfate at 750 mg from Amazon here! (240 Tablets)

Price: $22

Directions: Take 2 of the tablets, which combine for a total of 3000 mg of Glucosamine Sulfate every day, 1 during the morning and 1 during the evening.

I am part of the Amazon Affiliate program so if you buy it from the link above I do get a small bit of commission earnings. (which is around $1 for each bottle you buy)

Or you can buy the Glucosamine Sulfate at 1500 mg and just take 1 pill a day…

Buy the Glucosamine Sulfate at 1500 mg from Amazon here! (450 Tablets)

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So if the ingestion of the Glucosamine is something one does not want to try, there is something slightly more invasive which I propose at this point which probably has a high chance of getting through.

However a much more effective way is to get a syringe and use the StemPro® Chondrogenesis Differentiation Kit sold by Life Technologies. You want to combine the StemPro Chondrogenesis Differentiation Kit with the BMP-7 sold by Life Technologies as well. In my previous posts comparing the dozens of current growth factors out there which are most effective in getting the progenitor cells to differentiate into the chondrogenic line, BMP-7 aka OP-1 is the most chondrogenic, compared to say BMP-2, BMP-6, or BMP-9.

You want to get the angle just right to get the initial syringe just along the surface of the middle of the articular cartilage of the proximal tibial epiphysis. The first injection will be the right mesenchyme, the MSCs, and the 2nd injection, using the same needle as a vessel would be the administration of the BMP-7, to get the progenitor cells to differentiate into the chondrocytes, which will over time diffuse downwards the articular cartilage into columns. To activate the chondrocytes to hypertrophize, you can use the various methods of chondrocyte hypertrophy that Tyler has talked about over the years, which range in a variety of subjects.

Note: If you take the 2nd approach, it might be slightly hard to obtain these tissue engineering lab components. That will be the 1st major hurdle since this type of material seems to be available only for medical professionals, physicians and researchers. Of course, I am aware that there is at least 1 person who regularly reads this blog who just finished their medical school and was doing their first year residency.

Note #2: You want to also get a biopsy of your cartilage tissue and issue how your own immune system it will react to the injected MSCs and BMP-7. BMP-7 which is just a growth factor by itself should be the same in all humans so the human body’s immune system should not react when it gets injected, but the MSCs might be. When doing an ear or nose piercing for a new stud or earring, it might be smart to save the fibrocartilage material and test how the cartilage tissue in calf serum medium would react with the MSCs injected into it. It is also suggest that a 2nd biopsy is done with some extracted blood and have a histological examination to see how your bodies immune system will react to the injected MSCs. Will it start to go into inflammation, White T-Cells attacking it, Red Platelets clogging around it, or maybe nothing at all?

So to do the 2nd part, for safety reasons, you will be required to do an immunological testing to see whether the MSCs you did get will be okay with the overall system. I would guess that if one did manage to get the cells and the growth factors on the top of the articular cartilage, the result would be upwards of just 1 cm in increased height, if there is adequate induced chondrocytes and the right technique for chondrocyte hypertrophy is chosen.

Tyler’s Notes:

It has been established that longitudinal bone growth occurs at the articular cartilage of some bones as shown by some finger studies.  However, the joint and epiphysis may constrain this growth.  Possibly related to the periosteum.  Endochondral ossification has been shown to occur at many joint areas.

Longitudinal bone growth is not significant in the articular cartilage due to some constraint from the epiphysis or the joint.  There have been studies showing that the periosteum constrains growth and that periosteal stripping can enhance growth.  Since LSJL is applied on the joint cavity it could influence the mechanisms by which the joint cavity and epiphysis constrain growth.  However, LSJL seemed to upregulate periosteal related genes.  But none of the genes were periosteum specific so it could’ve just been a correlational effect.  And the afformentioned study, compared the perichondrium to the periosteum rather than the periosteum to the bone.  If the perichondrium does not constrain growth whereas the periosteum does it’s possible that the LSJL could enhance growth by altering the shape of the periosteum so it is not so growth constraining.  LSJL did upregulate perichondrium genes much more than periosteum genes.

I’d like to also mention a note from the study “Metacarpophalangeal length changes in humans during adulthood: A longitudinal study” which states “When cartilage thickness exceeds the critical dimensions that limit nutrition by diffusion, the cartilage cells hypertrophy and degenerate, the spaces become vascularized, and osteoblasts develop to initiate endochondral bone formation in the midst of the articular cartilage.”<-So a primary way to induce endochondral ossification is to just increase articular cartilage thickness.

Conclusion:

1. Articular cartilage undergoes endochondral ossification.

2. This endochondral ossification results in longitudinal bone growth in bones that do not have joints or epiphysis such as the bones in the fingers.

3. Identifying what in the joint or epiphysis constrains growth and how to disrupt this may allow articular cartilage to generate longitudinal bone growth in long bones with a joint and epiphysis.  Although as shown in the finger studies, growth via articular cartilage is very slow.

This is a post to maybe probe slightly into the psyche of people who might already be tall.

I was watching this YouTube video on Kungfu Panda and this episode seems to suggest just what might happen when people who was considered big or tall stop being tall because other people around them started to grow and become bigger. I am not sure how many people watched the movie but apparently one of the characters, being of very small size used some magical potion which they drank to make themselves much bigger in size.

When the antagonists realized how this previously small character managed to grow so much bigger, they wanted to be even bigger. As for the previously largest character, some crocodile, he became angry, and possibly a little jealous, that he was no longer the largest of them all. He enjoyed the fact that he was the largest of all the animals, and when there was a bigger animal that showed up, he felt threatened from comparing their sizes.

What would happen is that he would steal the vial of magical growth potion and drink all of it himself, when all you needed to do was take a couple of sips to get the size you want. It seems that this super-sized crocodile had a sort of complex over his size. He wanted to distinguish himself using his innate size. No one can be bigger than him.

It is a nice episode. You should watch it.

I am reminded of the fact that there apparently was a poster on some forum (forgot which one) who was 6′ 4″, which would be considered big, but desired to become 7′ 0″. It was some male teenager probably still in High School.

It seemed that they decided to place a large part of their identity on their size. How they defined themselves had a huge part over the fact that this person was either the tallest or one of the tallest in their class.

They derived a lot of self worth and self-esteem from being among the biggest in their class, school, or group of friends. They recently noticed that their friends are starting to grow taller, and started to catch up to them in height while for them, they seemed to have stopped getting taller. It seems that this person desired to always be a ‘stand out’ from their group of friends or class by wanting to push past their social circle.

They wanted to push past their friends and peers in terms of height so that the other people can never catch up to them at least on the issue of size. As long as this person could be 7 feet tall, no matter what happens, they can always feel good about themselves for being the tallest among their group.

The late writer Michael Crichton tells a similar story. At around 6′ 9′ – 6′ 10″ he was almost always the tallest person in any room, and often by a large measure. Being maybe even 6′ 10″ at some point in his life, he is around 4 standard of deviations away from what the average height of men are supposed to be. He tells the story of how he met Wilt Chamberlain the first time. It was said that Crichton was so shaken-up by the experience of finally meeting someone so much taller than him that he actually had a small identity crisis.

From the website MusingsOnMichaelCrichton…

As an adult, Crichton found being tall made it difficult to hear people speaking to him if he was standing. (New York Times) But meeting Wilt Chamberlain, who at 7’2” topped Crichton by five inches, gave him a different perspective. 

“To my surprise, I found myself standing on a step to make myself taller….I was so uncomfortable that, after a half-hour, I had to leave. When my therapist asked me why I wasn’t happy not to be the tallest, weirdest person in the room, I had to admit that a part of me is proud of what makes me different.” (Los Angeles Times)

When you have been lauded, admired, praised, and respected throughout your entire life for something that is so fundamental, and so immovable as extremely tall height, it is hard separate one’s sense of self-worth and self-esteem from one’s size. What happens on the day when you finally do come face to face with someone who is clearly taller than you?

Does the fact that the person in front of you mean that they are inherent better than you, and there is nothing that you can do about it?

Since human height is supposed to be something we can’t change, no matter what we do, it does seem to give people who are taller a sort of smug, internal satisfaction, in sort of realizing at some level that they will always have something over another person, no matter what the other person does.

I sort of get it. A significant portion of people who are extremely tall probably has some type of complex over being the tallest person or the need always be the tallest. So what will happen when they meet someone who is bigger than them?

Update #7 – Nothing Happened This Month – October 2, 2013

The month of September was a complete loss. There was absolutely no headway into this endeavor. It is partly due to the fact that so many other issues in my life have come up.

Things that are currently happening has included

• Multiple fines over issues in my past
• A dramatic increase in living costs over unexpected issues.
• Housing repair issues
• Legal issues with my other businesses
• Possible terminal illness risks
• Strange Illnesses which the physicians I have met with can’t even diagnose properly.
• and one other, life altering issue that has turned my life completely upside down

As for my measured height, I have not been able to get even that done. However I have noticed that I seem to have lost weight. As for health problems, my personal lower back pain seems to have plateaued and not gotten worst.

I hope the readers can put up with this thing for a little while longer. I don’t expect to get back into doing any type of serious research at least until maybe even December.

There is nothing else I would wish to discuss or reveal any further to the regular readers.

I have personally been working on multiple different projects in the last few months and that is for financial reasons. This project is never supposed to be very profitable. However, those other projects are in the field of medicine, specifically bioelectrical medicine which most people have probably never looked into before.

In my research for these other projects, I would again come across the research of Dr. Robert O. Becker, whose book “The Body Electric” was a very big eye opener for me. I managed to get a PDF of his book and printed it out at the local copier place close to where I live. I wanted to look at what other people have been able to propose and create who referenced Robert’s Work.

(Note: Back in the 1980s-1990s there were actually TWO different people with similar names doing this type of biomedical research on the therapeutic effects of fringe sciences. There is Robert (Bob) C. Beck Sc. D. ,the physicist who created the Beck Protocol promoting injecting colloidal silver, drinking ozone water, and using magnetic pulsers (like the Soma Pulser) and Robert O. Becker M.D., who is a Medical doctor or surgeon who did his research in almost the exact same area, but focused on the effect of electricity on bone and limb regeneration. Both of the researchers did researchers worked on the effects of iontophoresis.)

Publications by the Physicist Bob Beck –

1. Alternating current supplied electrically conductive method and system for treatment of blood and/or other body fluids and/or synthetic fluids with electric forces – Patent #: US 5188738 – Authors: Steven Kaali, Peter M. Schwolsky

Publications by the Medical Doctor Robert Becker (source) –

1. US Patent # 5,814,094 – Iontopheretic System for Stimulation of Tissue Healing and Regeneration
2. Robert O. Becker – The Discovery of Silver
3. R. O. Becker, et al., “Experience With Low-Current Silver Electrode Treatment of Nonunion,” in Electrical Prop. Bone & Cartilage (ed. C. T. Brighton, et al.), Grune & Stratton (1979), USA.
4. R. O. Becker, et al., “Clinical Exp. With Low Intensity Direct Current Stimulation of Bone Growth,” Clin. Orthop. & Rel. Res., vol. 124, pp. 75-83 (1977) . USA.
5. Silver Helps Regrow Tissues in Hundreds of Patients – Destroyed Cells Regenerate With Silver-Based Procedure

After going through the Google Patents database, and doing all the research, I found what I think is another breakthrough, which is a similar type of technology. This is known as Low Level Laser Therapy. Low Level Laser therapy is believed by its proponents to have benefits benefits (at least temporarily) against the symptoms of arthritis, osteoarthritis, and tendinopathy, and lower back pain.

Note: The therapy is extremely controversial, with quite a few medical professionals who discredit the efficacy of the idea.

This post is just an extension on the post Tyler wrote a while back where he referenced the study Effects of laser acupuncture on longitudinal bone growth in adolescent rats.. He managed to find a PubMed article showing that Laser Acupuncture has an effect on the longitudinal growth rate of long bones in lab rats. That is good news.

Now I have found a few studies which correlate the application of Low Level Lasers to increased cartilage generation in the epiphyseal growth plates as well as decreased degeneration of

I also like to refer to the study Effect of GaAlAs laser irradiation on the epiphyseal cartilage of rats. This study seems to sort of validate the idea that laser irradiation on the developing bones do seem to have some type of positive, stimulating effect.

• Low-level laser on femoral growth plate in rats.
• The effect of low level laser on condylar growth during mandibular advancement in rabbits.
• The effect of 904 nm low level laser on condylar growth in rats.

We do know that there are anti-degenerative properties for Articular Cartilage from studies like “The effect of low-level laser to apoptosis of chondrocyte and caspases expression, including caspase-8 and caspase-3 in rabbit surgery-induced model of knee osteoarthritis.” and “The effect of different treatment time of millimeter wave on chondrocyte apoptosis, caspase-3, caspase-8, and MMP-13 expression in rabbit surgically induced model of knee osteoarthritis.”

However this conclusion and theory on using LLLT to increase bone longitudinal growth seems to be completely negated by the study The effects of low-level laser therapy, 670 nm, on epiphyseal growth in rats.

At this point, the conclusion I can make is that if you manage to emit a specific type of electromagnetic pulse of a certain type of frequency, impulse time, and intensity, there seems to be a lot of evidence in showing that the growth of growth plates can be stimulated, and the degeneration of articular cartilages can be decreased. It can be from a variety of electrical and photo stimuli, including lasers.