An osteochondroma is considered, in non medical terms, a bone growth on large bones near the growth plate usually around the femur or shoulder blades. Although the cause is officially considered unknown, scientists have been conducting studies that are proving that mutations in the EXT1 and EXT2 genes may be the cause of osteochondromas. Osteochondromas tend to start out small and painless, but as they feed off the growth plate and grow larger they start to limit physical activity when the ligaments and tendons are hyperextended around the bone growth. In order to fix this problem you have two choices; take pain killers or get it surgically removed. Depending on whether you have multiple osteochondroma or solitary osteochondroma the symptoms, treatment, and benign tumor itself is different. In the picture above is my solitary osteochondroma just before I got it surgically removed in 2013. Starting with the Johns Hopkins medical definition of an osteochondroma, I then move on to a video that documents an actual surgical procedure that removes a small multiple osteochondroma from the knee of a teenage boy. After that I provide a academic journal that has the specifics of how the mutations affect people with MO answering the questions; what they affect, where they are in effect, and how frequent they are in each gene followed by statistics backing that it up. Fourth, I introduce a newspaper article from 2011 that describes a high school baseball player who suffered the severe consequences of multiple osteochondroma and how a special surgical procedure fixed it. Finally I conclude with my answers to the three general research questions in a separate google document.
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