The human body is amazing - each organ clearly performs the function assigned to it, and the whole system is debugged and can continuously work for many years. There are organs that grow throughout life, but there are those that do not change throughout life or these changes are insignificant. People’s nose and ears grow all their lives, the bones of the feet and hands, too. The spongy bones are constantly increasing in size, and the tubular ones only up to a certain age. In men, the front of the skull grows, and this changes facial features.
There are also pathological changes in the size of certain organs. So, with hypertension, the heart can increase, and the kidney increases if the second is removed. Does the eye grow in a person?
How does the visual apparatus change throughout life
You can find a large amount of information that some organs in humans increase in size throughout life. And there is. But do eyes grow during life? There is evidence that there is not, and they can be considered true in a certain sense, because the size of the eyes remains almost the same all the time. But to be completely accurate and objective, it is worth noting that a slight increase in this organ still occurs.
Since birth
When a baby is born, the diameter of its eyeball is 18 mm and this size changes significantly during the first year of life. When asked whether eyes grow from birth, one can confidently answer: yes, they grow! In the future, this growth is very small, from infancy to adulthood, almost nothing changes. In adolescents, the eye socket is up to 21 mm in diameter, and in an adult only 24 mm. So, for the entire period, the increase may be 6-7 mm. But the eye consists of different parts and each of them develops in its own way: for example, the lens increases constantly, but the pupil begins to decrease after 20 years.
The experiments
Of course, pathologies always occur, they arise due to different circumstances, but the result suggests that something is going wrong. At different times, scientists conduct experiments to better understand how the human body works and how it works. First of all, all experiments are conducted on animals, and if they are successful, then they are gradually introduced into work with people. In order to find out if the eye is growing in humans and what affects it, studies were carried out on chickens. In the embryo, the eye fluid was pumped out through the tube and the intraocular pressure decreased. During the period when the chicken was ready to hatch, it turned out that the eyeball had not grown to its size, the retina continued its normal growth and was now enlarged and formed folds. The exact reasons for the growth of the eyeball could not be found.
Period of active growth
If we understand in detail whether the eye grows with age, we can note the main stages in this process. The active period of change falls on the first two years of life. In the same period, the formation of the visual cortical center occurs. When the baby is two months old, his oculomotor nerves stop developing. From this time, reactions appear that provide synchronous movement of both eyes. Here, light is the main stimulant of the entire visual system. Photosensitivity fully ripens only to 14 years.
The sensitivity of the cornea in a baby is practically absent, and by the year it becomes the same as in an adult. Visual acuity can develop up to 7 years.
Amazing eye device
In fact, the important thing is not whether the eye grows, but how correctly the development of all its elements occurs. At different ages, certain skills of the child develop, which means that changes occur at the biological level. For example, in order for color vision to be correctly formed, the baby needs to be attracted to the game with bright toys. Binocular vision can mature completely under the condition of muscle balance, and this will happen only after the baby learns to walk or crawl.
If it seems like your eyes are growing
Very often, adults pay attention to the fact that children have large, wide eyes, but as they grow older they will become normal, the shape of the face and its individual features will change, because the skull grows, but there are no eyes. We can see only 1/6 of the eyeball, and visually this view does not change much even from school age. But sometimes parents begin to notice that the child’s eyes have become larger, and sometimes such an impression develops relative to an adult. The question is, does the eye grow or does it just seem so? What is really going on?
Visually, it may really seem that the eye has become larger, but this already speaks of health problems and you need to see a doctor. Such a protrusion of the eyeball can be in case of a violation of the thyroid gland, for example, with Basedov’s disease. This can also happen if the muscles that hold the eyeball in the orbit relax. This does not mean that the organ is growing, it is simply due to violations that it began to look bigger.