Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: SF Chinese (ID:kexuejiaodian), author: SF

Many people are more or less height anxious, perhaps not to themselves, to a large extent, in the hope that their children can grow taller. As a result, these parents tried every means to help their children grow up. For example, some parents will let their children practice basketball from an early age, thinking that playing basketball can increase their height; some parents think that calcium supplements can promote bone growth and help their children grow taller; and some parents believe in simple folk prescriptions. they think that if their children stretch their legs when they are young, they can grow up when they grow up.

(by Mei Lin / tr. by Robert Taylor)

In fact, if you want your child to grow taller in the future, you must first know what factors affect your height. Only in this way can you prescribe the right medicine to the case.

Factors affecting human height

Nutrition

health

Exercise

genes

More exercise will not grow taller? Now that we know the factors that affect height, many partners may think that height improvement can be achieved overnight. There is a view that exercise can make children grow taller. But this is not the case with Spanish scientists. They divided minors into several groups according to the amount of exercise, and conducted a follow-up survey for several years. After analyzing the relationship between exercise and height, they found that there was no significant difference in height among the groups. In other words, exercise does not make children grow taller.

Basketball players may be chosen as basketball players because they are taller than others. Not because playing basketball makes you taller. (photo source: Pixabay) Nutrition and health status, such as illness and injury, are not the most important factors, although they can affect a child's future height. In other words, if you start with nutrition and health, it has no obvious effect on promoting children's growth.

All in all, it is too difficult for children to grow taller in the future. But things have taken a turn for the better. Scientists have discovered the key factors that affect height.

A team led by Nora Rental, a pediatric endocrinologist at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in the United States, used mice as experimental materials. They screened 600 million mouse chondrocytes and used gene editing techniques to knock out some candidate cells to observe the changes in the growth and development of chondrocytes after they were knocked out. The results showed that 145 of the genes were knocked out, resulting in abnormal growth and development of mouse chondrocytes, which were similar to bone diseases such as skeletal dysplasia.

The increase in bone length is the main reason for the increase in human height. The increase of bone length mainly comes from the appearance of new bone at the end of the long bone. The growth plate in bone scale is made up of chondrocytes. (photo Source: Gilo1969) cartilage is a major participant in bone growth, and human height growth boils down to bone growth. Through the study of mouse chondrocytes, we know that genes can regulate the growth and development of chondrocytes, and then affect bone growth. Are there any corresponding genes in human cells that affect the growth and development of chondrocytes, which in turn affect the growth of bones and determine human height?

Scientists have carried out further research. By comparing the 145 mouse genes with the results of a large-scale genetic study of human height, the scientists found a significant overlap between the genes associated with human height and the 145 mouse genes. In other words, scientists have now pinpointed the location of genes that determine human height in the human genome-they are the most important determinants of human height.

Does the "height gene" help fight cancer? At present, scientists do not know how the genes that determine height determine height. It is believed that these genes determine height by regulating cell proliferation. This is very valuable, and the data show that tall people are more likely to develop prostate cancer, bladder cancer, lung cancer and osteoporosis, and cancer is caused by the uncontrolled proliferation of cancer cells. so will the genes that determine height have anything to do with the reproduction of cancer cells? To figure this out, there may be a more effective way to fight cancer in the future.

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