I have looked at the statistics on this website and the date at which this website was created seemed to have been 1 years ago.

The very first post ever written entitled “Why This?” was written and posted on June 27th. The hosting server seems to show that this website was actually created in July 22 of 2012 but the point is that it has been a very interesting 1 year of dedicated research I have put in towards this goal.

I wanted to give the regular readers a look at the vital statistics and numbers of how this website has been doing so far over this 1 entire year. (click the pic to get the larger size)

The tracking software that I use is called Clicky, not Google Analytics. Google Analytics does not give the real-time numbers that Clicky can do. The numbers from the two sources are slightly off too.

The daily number of visitors is around 1000-1400 on average. There was two times when a story or post was picked up and taken virally so the website numbers spiked up. They were both about the former Tanya Angus who suffered an extremely back version of acromegaly which made her almost 7 feet tall. The traffic has grown steadily over time, but has sort of plateaued in the last 4 months around the 1000 total visitors/day mark.

There has been 961 posts written with another 26 posts that is in private waiting to be finished and published.

So far the Natural Height Growth Facebook Page has been “liked” 67 times.

The number of people on the email mailing list which I use AWeber is around 334 People with another 36 people who decided to unsubscribe.

From using the podcast service Libsyn, I have produce only 10 podcast episodes with a total of 1647 total downloads of the episodes. The most listened to episodes were probably on Episode #5 with Hakker.

I created the website www.NaturalHeightGrowthForum.com months ago but decided not to fully implement all of the forum features since I did not want to shoulder the responsibility of also running a forum website. It was taken down now and no longer active.

There has been a few posts that has been much bigger than others, some which showed that researchers and scientists are working on the subject of height research to see which genes, mRNA, and signaling pathways affect the overall growth and height in humans.

Refer to post

Hundreds Of Variants Clustered In Genomic Loci And Biological Pathways Affect Human Height (BREAKTHROUGH)

Important Posts

• Engineering Growing Cartilage Tissue In Vivo Through Chondrocyte Transplantation (Big Breakthrough!) 

This recent post I wrote showed that scientists have been successful in growing completely new growth plates, with the bones and cartilage with the right type of cartilage sections needed to make volumetric expansion of bone tissue possible.

My Plans For The Upcoming Year

I feel like the posts are getting stronger, and the amount of knowledge on how the body really works is increasing. Some posts I have written like…

1. The PI3K, AKT And mTOR Signaling Pathway
2. The Connection Between The Wnt Beta Catenin Signaling Pathway And Growth, Part I

might be a little too technical for most researchers who just want to know what the steps are. The truth is that the website will be going much deeper into the science, molecular biology, and genetics in the future because I realize that we have to. Most of the easy stuff has already been thought of and tried. It doesn’t take a genius to see that orally ingesting letrozole might delay growth plate closure.

So this website is only going to get more technical as I shift more towards genetics and looking at the effect mRNA and the microRNA has towards mitosis of progenitor stem cells.

Ideas I would go deeper into

I wanted to look more at ways to de-ossify the bones and remove the calcium crystals that make bone tissue so tough to bend or pull. The idea of using vinegar to make bones more rubberized is very interesting. Refer to post “Using Acids To Induce Reverse Ossification For Calcium Mineral Absorption”

Current methods on how physicians and surgeons do surgery, specifically look at noninvasive approaches, like an incredible new technique known as magnetic resonance (MR)-guided high-intensity focused ultrasound (tcMRgHIFU). Refer to study “High-intensity focused ultrasound for noninvasive functional neurosurgery.“

Stem Cell Research – This one area is probably the most promising of all the possible paths to take. I wrote about the idea of using stem cells to grow taller. The possible is actually very high that something will be found in less than 20 years.

The best combination of growth factor mixture that would lead to the highest chondrogenic potential in terms of differentiation and proliferation.

Going right behind the first post about the possibility of using Sodium Pento Polysulfate aka Pento entitled “Increase Height And Grow Taller Using Sodium Pentosan Polysulfate AKA Pentosan” is this 2nd post where I wanted to go back to the idea of using a Pentosan derivative or variation to cause degraded articular cartilage to regain some of the thickness back leading to a slight height increase of maybe 1-2 mms.

Let’s look at the study “The effects of orally administered calcium pentosan polysulfate on inflammation and cartilage degradation produced in rabbit joints by intraarticular injection of a hyaluronate-polylysine complex.”

The study is rather simple. The researchers first use a combination of “a preformed polycation complex (PC) of poly-D-lysine and hyaluronan” to be injected into the synovial joint cavity of the lab animal to make that synovial joint gap stimulating inflammation of the overall joint. A normal saline solution was injected into the other same joint on the other side of the body to be used as a control.

Later the rabbit was fed the pentosan polysulfate and the results were that the Interleukin-6 concentrations were decreased. The researchers would conclude… “…preserve cartilage PGs in inflamed rabbit joints suggests that this substance could be of value as an effective orally administered chondroprotective, antiarthritic drug”

This compound can definitely protect the chondrocytes and cartilage layers, and decrease the symptoms of arthritis, by keeping the cartilage thickness intact for much longer. I suspect that it would lead to a slight increase in height in adults from this factor.

Something else before we continue…

The medical procedure of an Intra-Articular Injection needs to be looked at much more since it is a new clinical or medical method which I have not known before, or at least did not know the actual term of the process. For more information about Intra-Articular Injections, click on this study HERE written from the medical journal Anesthesiology Clinics.

This would be something which I think is viable for a really good alternative to invasive surgery for height increase if we can get the articular cartilage to start to behave like the growth plate cartilage.

I was looking for more information about the connection between height increase and stem cell research when someone linked to a website which I found would make an excellent new resource I and fellow height increase researchers can use to see just what the major organizations, institutions, corporations, and possibly even military researchers are doing. The government website Clinical Trials may turn out to be an even bigger resource to find potential new techniques, ideas, and treatments than even from Google Patents, Google Scholar, or PubMed.

From the Clinical Trials Website…

ClinicalTrials.Gov – A service of the U.S. National Institutes of Health

ClinicalTrials.gov is a registry and results database of publicly and privately supported clinical studies of human participants conducted around the world.

Some terms I would want to look through are…

• Longitudinal growth
• Growth Plate
• Epiphyseal
• Physeal
• Short Statured
• Tall Statured
• Gigantism & acromegaly
• growth hormone
• bone morphogenetic protein
• increased longitudinal growth

I will be putting this website along the top of my resources and website list to look for relevant information, just like Google Scholar, Google Patents, & Pubmed.

Background On Sam Snyder

I contacted Sam in the early months of the the website’s development to ask about his own opinion on Tyler’s blog and what he felt was the direction of potential height increase research. Of all the bloggers in the internet who has ever done any type of extensive, serious review on Tyler’s HeightQuest.com website, it has been Sam Snyder, who talked about the research we might see in the decades ahead on what might be created biomedically for use. I have mentioned Sam’s name in a few past previous posts.

Something I found today which is really interesting is that the blogger Sam Snyder, who I have actually contacted in the past wrote a post back in July of 2011 which suggests that someone he knew was offer a chance to get their height increased by 30 cms from getting stem cells injected into their bones using a machine from South Korea and at a clinic in China.

Growing Taller with Stem Cells in the Future

I found an article recently which stated that a completely new compound which I have never heard of has the ability to increase the amount of stem cells taken from human blood and bone marrow. Personally I believe that one of the best approaches and paths towards alternative height increasing ideas is to study more on potential compounds that can increase stem cells. This compound called Pleiotrophin is very new to me so I asked the question “Can we potentially inject pleiotrophin in our cartilage or bones to induce chondrogenesis and cartilage formation, and thus increase in height and make us taller?”

The article is entitled “Newly-Identified Growth Factor Promotes Stem Cell Growth, Regeneration” which I found from DukeHealth.org which is some website affiliated with Duke Medicine.

This compound seems to be a recently discovered growth factor that has the function of “stimulating the growth and regeneration of hematopoietic  stem cells in vitro and in vivo.” The new growth factor has potential since one of the biggest challenges with traditional applications of stem cells is the fact that stem cells seem to not proliferate very easily and the quantity of stem cells available is very little. It seems that the stem cell researchers have agreed that the ultimate source for stem cells for people who need transplants (ie. people who have cancer and can not longer use the chemo & radiation approach) would be from umbilical cord blood. The amount of umbilical cords are obviously extremely limited and there has not been any type of growth factor that is good enough in expanding the number of stem cells from the umbilical cord. When the researchers injected lab rats with pleiotrophin they noticed that the amount of stem cells that were coming from or produced by the bone marrow increased 10 fold. So obviously this compound might have some very important applications. However there is some worry that this compound might also cause some cells in the body to turn malignant although so far so results show this to be the case.

So I looked through PubMed and dug up as many useful and relevant studies as I could find to see what is the effect of pleiotrophin on bone tissue and cartilage tissue, if any. These are the studies that I managed to find.

Study #1: Pleiotrophin inhibits chondrocyte proliferation and stimulates proteoglycan synthesis in mature bovine cartilage.

Pleiotrophin turns out to be a type of regulated protein that is found commonly in the cartilage of fetuses but not developed mature cartilage. It binds to heparin. When the proteoglycan from the medium of mature chondrocytes are removed and treated with this compound, the synthesis of proteoglycan increases by 3 X. When the same pleiotrophin is added to the chondrocytes of fetuses, there is no increase in the level of proteoglycan synthesis. It seems that pleiotrophin seems to be able to control by inhibiting the growth of chondrocytes. When FGF and heparin was used, they could not reverse the effects of pleiotrophin. Upregulation of the mRNA for the proteins biglycan and collagen type II are also seen in the treated mature chondrocytes. It was noticed also that glycoaminoglycan concentration was increase multiple fold.

The researchers concluded that “These results establish that PTN inhibits cell proliferation, while stimulating the synthesis of proteoglycans in mature chondrocytes in vitro, suggesting that PTN may act directly or indirectly to regulate growth and proteoglycan synthesis in the developing matrix of fetal cartilage.”
Study #2: Effects of pleiotrophin, a heparin-binding growth factor, on human primary and immortalized chondrocytes.

It seems that this compound is expressed in mature cartilage in the early stages of osteoarthritis. However it seems that if you stimulate chondrocytes with the pleiotrophin for a long enough time you reduce the mRNA of VEGF as well as Nitric Oxide production. The other big part is that the mRNA for MMP-1 & MMP-13 were reduced, while the inhibitors of the MMPs, something called TIMP-1 & TIMP-2 were induced, which suggest that it could be very useful for chondrocyte formation. It was concluded that PTN is a autocrine growth factor in cartilage which has a role during the formation of osteoarthritis when the chondrocytes start to aggregate together.

Study #3: Pleiotrophin, an embryonic differentiation and growth factor, is expressed in osteoarthritis.

This compound is said to be “expressed in mesodermal and neuroectodermal cells during development, but rarely in adult tissues“. The researchers wanted to see whether PTN would show up in the synovial fluid of joints which have osteoarthritis. It seems that this growth factor has roles in cancer development, in chondrocyte differentiation, and during embryonic growth. The most interesting conclusion is that during early stages of OA, the mRNA for this peptide is expressed. While some people might think it is a bas compound, the researchers conclude that “PTN might be involved in cartilage repair in OA, in particular, in earlier stages”

Study #4: Expression of pleiotrophin, an embryonic growth and differentiation factor, in rheumatoid arthritis.

It seems that PTN was strongly up-regulated in synovial tissues from patients with rheumatoid arthritis while the up-regulation for people with osteoarthritis was much less. It also stimulated the proliferation of cultured human synoviocytes and in dermal fibroblasts VEGF. “Proinflammatory cytokines enhance the expression of PTN. Thus, we propose that PTN is a further paracrine angiogenesis and growth factor for synovial cells”

So what did I find and conclude about this compound? Does it have any type of pro-chondrogenic potential or anabolic properties?

As a growth factor, it is definitely anabolic and seems to have some qualities that make it very useful.

It seems to cause inflammation but inflammation is just the body’s immune system trying to attack a foreign object.

This compound is seen in both of the main types of arthritis. The general guess is that it is not expressed to start to damage the cartilage, but it is actually used to heal the cartilage during the early stages of arthritis at least.

It is said that this compound inhibits VEGF, NO, MMP-1 and MMP-13, all of which we have concluded at some point is bad for overall cartilage health.

This compound was shown to increase GAG and Proteoglycan concentrations in mature cartilage chondrocytes and medium/matrix in vivo and in vitro.

I would guess that injection of this compound would NOT cause arthritis since it seems to be to repair cartilage. If you injected it, the matrix of cartilage might generate more GAG and make the cartilage more robust and full.

There is a slight change that this compound can be used to keep cartilage healthier and slow down growth plate cartilage ossification.

While I was looking for sources yesterday which showed how stem cell research can one day be applied towards height increase I found a rather interesting story from the website for the The Daily Mail UK entitled “Botched stem cell facelift leaves woman with bones growing in her EYES “

The story is very much like what would be found in the tabloid stories in the US based Sun or Star Magazines but it did contain a small seed of useful information which we as height increase researchers might be interested in.

It seems that this women who went to a cosmetic surgeon in Beverly Hills noticed that her eyelids seemed to have been making a sort of “clicking” sound. She felt extreme pain when opening her eyelids. After going to another cosmetic surgeon to ask them what is the problem, it was found that she had bone tissue growing from her eye socket area.

From the article in the link…

“Dr Wu, of The Morrow Institute in California, told the magazine that when he first heard the woman’s complaint, he wondered if she was imagining things. 

But after painstaking six-hour surgery, he dug out small chunks of bone from her eyelid and the surrounding tissue.”

The clicking was two bone fragments that were scraping against each other. I would guess that somehow the injected stem cells that was taken from her stomach area turned into pieces of bones.

The researchers believe what happened was that the stem cells taken from the patient’s body reacted with a type of previous cosmetic surgery implantation, something known as dermal filler. The dermal filler has calcium in them. The dermal filler was added at the same time that her stem cells were added. The dermal filler was supposed to help remove wrinkles. The actual calcium is the calcium crystal hydroxyapatite

“During the procedure, cosmetic surgeons used liposuction to remove some fat from the woman’s abdominal area. They then isolated the stem cells.”

It seems that they took some adult adipose derived stem cells from the fat/adipose tissue around their stomach region. The tissue was filtered and purified to leave just the stem cells behind. The stem cells were injected into areas of the face to make the skin area look younger and healthier to produce what should have been new skin tissue and increase cell proliferation.

The 2nd cosmetic surgeon believed that the hydroxyapatite from the dermal filler got in contact with the stem cells which were injected into the face at the same time. Somehow the calcium crystal caused the adipose derived adult stem cells to start to differentiate into the osteogenic lineage.

The thing that is useful to know is the formula below

• Calcium Crystals Hydroxyapatite would cause adult adipose derived stem cells to differentiate into the osteogenic lineage formed bone tissue. 

• Hydroxyapatite + ADSCs = Bone