标题: Acromegaly [打印本页] 作者: choi 时间: 6-26-2022 12:11 标题: Acromegaly Acromegaly
Lisa Sanders, A Shifting Jaw. She had the full suite of menopause symptoms -- and a jaw that somehow moved out of alignment. What if this wasn't menopause after all? New York Times Magazine, June 19, 2022, at page 16. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/ ... umor-diagnosis.html
Note:
(a) "a jaw that somehow moved out of alignment [in subtitle] * * * Her teeth on the right side of her jaw didn't touch anymore. It was hard to chew her food well. What was really upsetting was that she'd had this problem before — for most of the previous year. When she couldn't put up with it anymore, she'd gone to her dentist, Dr Robert Souferian, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, who confirmed that her bite had shifted a little."
Acromegaly is known to cause a protruding lower jaw, which is mandibular prognathism as a medical term.
(b) "Acromegaly is rare. It is most extreme when the oversecretion of the hormone starts before puberty, when bones can still grow. André Roussimoff, more familiarly known as André the Giant, was 7-foot-4 when he finally stopped growing taller. After puberty, when bone growth stops, only soft tissues will enlarge.
(i) André the Giant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/André_the_Giant
(1946 – 1993; a French wrestler born there)
(ii) "It is most extreme when the oversecretion of the hormone starts before puberty, when bones can still grow. * * * After puberty, when bone growth stops, only soft tissues will enlarge."
(A) DURING puberty, growth hormone acts on cartilage called epiphyseal plate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphyseal_plate
, a thin, radiotranslucent layer (or gap) at the both ends of a long bones.
This is gigantism.
The English adjective epiphyseal is derived from the noun epiphysis (n; New Latin, from [Ancient] Greek [noun], growth, from [verb] epiphyesthai to grow on, from [prefix] epi- [on, above] + [verb] phyesthai to grow) https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epiphysis
, so named because the cartilage of epiphysis causes the long bone to grow (longer).
(B) The exact mechanism that growth hormone cause tissue swelling AFTER puberty, which is called acromegaly, is unclear.