Seniors get big ears
Older people often have larger ears than younger people. You have probably already noticed that. It is often said that the ears and also the nose continue to grow throughout your life. But is that really the case or does it just seem that way?
Yes, the ears get bigger as people get older. Several scientific studies have already shown this. But opinions differ about how and why.
For a long time it was thought that only men’s ears got bigger, but women also seem to be unable to escape it. Also in women they get bigger and bigger.
The idea that it was only the case in men was because until then only research had been done among men. One of the first to do so was James Heathcote, a general practitioner in Kent. He and three colleagues studied the ears of 206 men of different ages. They concluded that the ear increases in size by an average of 0.22 millimeters per year of life.
a lot of ears
A group of Italian scientists also studied a lot of ears. In 1996, they examined 843 people between the ages of 4 and 73. They found that the pinna can become 8 to 10 millimeters longer between the ages of 30 and 70. The ears of men over 65 years of age, in particular, were found to be growing strongly.
And the ears don’t just get longer. But according to the researchers, they are also broadening. Not very much, but as the tissue behind your ears thins, the pinna moves closer to your head. This makes the ears slightly wider.
photos
Ten years later, a group of German researchers conducted research in a different way. They studied photographs of a 1959 dissertation by a scientist named Montacer-Kuhssary.
It involved photos of 1,148 ears of newborn children, older children and adults up to and including 92 years. The research team took fifteen different measurements for each ear. This, they said, confirmed that ears never really stop growing over a person’s lifetime. That was the case for men and women. However, it was much faster for men than for women.
cartilage production
So the ears get bigger. According to Heathcote, this is because the ears are made of cartilage. And cartilage continues to grow, unlike bone, which normally stops growing at puberty.
Others think that the ear stops growing, but that due to aging and various other factors, the earlobe sags and thus becomes larger.
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