Growth After Surgery

[Carly_16]

How do you know how much you will grow after surgery?

[The Slice]

That really depends on how much of your growth was completed prior to surgery. One of the things that is often done is to take an xray of your hand during the evaluation process. The reason for doing this is to see what the status of your growth plates is. When you are very young, they are for all intents and purposes, not there. When you reach the end of the growth spurt of puberty, these growth plates begin to close. For girls, this is usually about the time they start menstruating. From there, the average is about 2 inches. The pattern is that the long bones (the arms and legs) grow first, and then the torso follows. There was a post somewhere here, or on Spinekids from a girl about 15 who said that she was (I think) 5'5" before surgery and a year after surgery was about 5'11". I would suggest that she probably hit her growth spurt late, and that growth was almost entirely in her legs. It also didn't take into account how much she gained just from the spinal correction itself. If your height has pretty much leveled off prior to surgery, you'll be about the same that you were before the surgery, plus what you gained from the straightening of the curves. To understand this better, take a piece of paper, and fold it in half. With the folded paper flat and the fold pointing away from you, hold the eges of the paper oppisite the fold. As you open up the paper, for every increment that the angle increases in the fold, the amount of change in distance between the edges decreases.

Let's say that at going from 0 deg. to 1 deg., the distance from edge to edge, is 1". Now, when you go from 179 deg - 180 deg. the change in distance of the two edges is almost unmeasurable

[Snoopy]

Sometimes it depends on the type of procedure they do. My daughter only grew about 1/2 inch after surgery where as some kids have grown 2-3 inches.

Mary Lou

[flowerpower]

My son gained about 1 3/4" immediately after surgery. His Risser still measured 0 at time of surgery so he also still has some growing left to do.

Renee

[AnnLF]

My daughter gained 2 1/4 inches when she came out of her surgery in November. She loves telling people that she grew more than 2 inches in 11 hours!
Ann