Doctors manage to halt 7ft 12-year-old from growing any bigger



Lofty: Brenden Adams is 7ft 3ins and is only 12

Doctors first realised Brenden Adams was unusually big at two months, at four months he had all his teeth, and by the age of eight he was the same height as a 15-year-old.

Now at just 12 years old he is a staggering 7ft 3ins and until a recent medical breakthrough it was feared he would not stop growing.

Brenden's runaway growth - caused by a unique genetic condition -has baffled doctors for years and they have frantically tried to find a way of slowing it down.



Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, Dr Melissa Parisi, a geneticist at Seattle Children's hospital, where Brenden has been cared for since he was four, said:

'We were concerned that he would continue growing and there'd just be no stopping it.

'He really is a remarkable young boy. He's unique.'

The extraordinary condition is caused by a fault in Brenden's DNA and he is the only person in the world known to suffer from it.



His 12th chromosome broke off during embryonic development, flipped around and reattached itself upside down, disrupting a gene that controls growth.

This caused his bones to stretch to extreme proportions.

For the last six months Brenden has stopped growing thanks to Gad Kletter, an endocrinologist at Seattle's Swedish Hospital, who treated him with high doses of testosterone to help him begin puberty early.

This accelerated the process by which the growth plates at each end of human bones naturally close themselves off.

Dr Parisi said: 'Before treatment, he was on a trajectory that was still taking him up and up, rather than reaching a plateau.



'Plotting his growth curve, we think he would have been over eight feet now'.



Brenden, who has also appeared on ABC News in America, was a normal 7lb 3oz at birth and was also a regular length at 19.5 inches.

His mother Debbie Ezell, 40, said: 'At his two month check-up the doctor kept re-measuring and said 'something's just not right, he's way too big for his age, too long.'

'At four months, he got all his teeth at once and they were like, 'OK, something's going on here.

'Sometimes he would grow several inches a month.'



Brenden lives in Ellensburg, a small town in Washington state, and Mrs Ezell said the community have been very supportive and rallied around the youngster.

Complications with the condition - including fatty tumours, one which is on his brain, painfully enlarged joints, a heart condition and bleeding problems - mean he has no idea how long he has left to live.



Mrs Ezell said: 'He was happy as a baby and he's happy now.

'You can see pain on his face when he's struggling, but he doesn't want anybody to know, he just deals with it.'

Family and friends have done all they can to make Brenden's existence easier.



The doors and ceilings of his home have been enlarged, he has a custom-made bed and his mother buys him over-sized clothes on the internet.

Mrs Ezell said: 'The hardest part is just not knowing what the life expectancy is.

'But it's truly Brenden that keeps everyone on the positive side.



If he's not here in a couple of years, we'll look back and think 'Yes, but when he was here, wasn't it good?'