Doctors halt growth of 7ft 12-year-old

London, Aug 31 : Doctors have managed to stop a 12-year-old boy who is 7ft 3ins tall from growing any bigger.

Medical experts 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 has been caused by a unique genetic condition.

Doctors who spent years puzzling over the cause of his runaway growth have now succeeded in slowing its pace, declaring Brenden the only known case of his kind in the world.

"We were concerned that he would continue growing and there'd just be no stopping it," Telegraph quoted Dr Melissa Parisi, a geneticist at Seattle Children's Hospital, who has been seeing Brenden since he was four years old, as saying.

"He really is a remarkable young boy. He's unique," the expert added.

Brenden's condition caused by a flaw in his DNA: part of his 12th chromosome inexplicably broke away during embryonic development, flipped itself and then reattached upside down, disrupting a gene that helps to control growth and causing his bones to elongate to extreme proportions.

Dr Gad Kletter, an endocrinologist at Seattle's Swedish Hospital, treated him with high doses of testosterone to prompt the early onset of puberty, accelerating the process by which the growth plates that sit at each end of human bones naturally close themselves off.

Brenden is so lofty that he has to stoop to get through doorways, barely fits in his mother's car and dangles uncomfortably over normal sized beds.

He has not grown any more for six months.

ANI