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Asked by to Aimee, Chris, Dave, Greig, Laurence on 17 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
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Dave Jones answered on 17 Jun 2014:
People do tend to get smaller, sure. But it’s not because they are shrinking, it’s because their posture changes (they begin to slump over a little bit) and the cartilage between their bones begins to degrade, reducing the gap between the bones (particularly the bones in their spine).
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Greig Cowan answered on 17 Jun 2014:
Yes, people do get smaller. I know for a fact that my grandparents have been shrinking recently! People don’t grow anymore once they have reach adolescence. People can get bigger after that time, but it is due to increase in muscle mass or fat, rather than real growth.
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Aimee Hopper answered on 17 Jun 2014:
yeh, unfortunately we do! I think I’ve started already!
You stop growing by the end of puberty, so about 18 for girls and about 21 for boys.
As you grow older, the skeleton gets damaged due to wear and tear, and people tend to slump more (the head is a heavy thing you know!), so that makes people look shorter too.Also, you will shrink over the course of the day simply because of standing up. – try it! Measure your height as soon as you wake up, and just before you go to bed!
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Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 20 Jun 2014:
When they are small, kids have plates on their bones called ‘growth plates’ (the technical word is ‘epiphyseal plate’), placed at the end of each long bone. Those plates are made of cartilage (that’s the same thing your nose and ears are made of, so it’s not quite bone, it’s a lot softer), and the cells on those cartilages keep on duplicating, all the time. The old cells gets push towards the edge of the plate, where the bone is, while the young ones stay in the centre of the plate. The older those special cartilage cells are, the more they become hard like bone (that called ‘ossification’, basically they become bone as they get older). That’s how the bones grow and become longer!
When you reach your mid-teens, the brain starts to produce an hormone that slows the duplication down, so the bone grows more and more slowly, and eventually even the cells in the centre of the plates become old, solidify, and become bone. At the end of you teen years, there is only a small scar left. and even that disappears.
After that, your body has lost ability to grow. So it just wears down with time. There are 2 main reason why people become shorter as they become old.
1) the cushions between their vertebras wears out due to gravity (Aimee said it right: that even happens over the course of a single day, but the damage and shortening effect becomes permanent with years)
2) a sickness called osteoporosis. That happens when a bone is broken down by wear, and not enough new bone material is made to replace it. Over time, people with osteoporosis lose more and more bone, the bones become smaller and weaker. Old people, especially women, are more likely to get osteoporosis. Over time their bones get damaged, and they are more likely to become hunched over or stooped.
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