In collections of interesting facts about the human body, there is often a statement that a person’s nose and ears grow throughout life. We decided to check whether these organs really have such an amazing ability.
Accepted countthat a person stops growing with the completion of puberty, that is, at the age of 16–18 years for women and 18–20 for men. However, not only in social networks And blogs, but also in materials Media You can come across the statement that the ears and nose continue to grow further, until death.
Visually, when comparing photographs of one person at different ages, you will notice that the ears and nose look larger in later photographs. One of the first such a pattern tracked A. Montaser-Koussari in 1959, after analyzing 1,448 photographs of infants, children, adults and the elderly (the oldest person in these photographs was 92 years old). He noted an increase in the length of these organs depending on age, while stipulating that the ears usually “leave” the noses.
Then scientists assumed, that the reason for the sagging of the tip of the nose and earlobes with age is associated with the effect of gravity, aggravated by those who wear massive jewelry, as well as with a general decrease in height, against which the previous nose and ears appear larger.
In 1990, doctors B. Stein and L. Peltz published study, which included 596 boys and 675 girls. In it, the authors concluded that the length of the ears increases annually (by 0.66 mm in boys and by 0.46 mm in girls).
First experiment Dr. James Heathcote conducted the study with adults, selecting 206 men of different ages for the study. As a result of measurements, he came to the conclusion that ears do indeed grow with age, but could not answer the question why. The average annual “growth” of ears was 0.22 mm per year, which is significantly less than that of teenagers, but still impressive: over 45 years, ears can grow a full centimeter.
Japanese physiologists went further and asked the question to what extent a person’s height is related to the annual growth of his ears. Their conclusions were published in 1996 in the British Medical Journal in the article “Correlation of ear length with age in Japan.” The scientists confirmed James Heathcote's thesis that ear length increases with age, and also demonstrated that "height-adjusted ear length shows a greater correlation with age," meaning that taller people's ears grew faster.
In 2008, a team of scientists from the Free University of Berlin produced measurements on 15 parameters on more than 1000 photographs of volunteers of different ages, including both infants and people over 90 years old. They confirmed that ears do indeed grow throughout life, and in men more than in women.
Gravity is not the only factor that plays a role in the enlargement of the nose and ears throughout life. The ears and nose are made up of several types of tissue: bone, cartilage, muscle, fatty tissue and skin. And although bones stop growing with the closure of the growth plate (the epiphyseal plate of hyaline cartilage is replaced by the epiphyseal line), cartilage continue growth throughout our lives. It is the division of cells of this type of tissue that is responsible for the annual growth of our ears and noses.
Thus, a person's ears and nose actually grow throughout life. However, if you are already out of adolescence, when such growth is quite rapid, then there is no point in comparing yourself with recent photographs - after all, the annual growth of the ears and nose is so slow that these organs add an average of 1 cm over 45 years of adult life.
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