by wildcherry on Monday, November 9th, 2009 | News, Weird

Brenden Adams, of Ellensburg, Wash., is already 7 feet 4.6 inches tall, and still growing is the World’s tallest teen. The teen’s super-tall stature is all due to his 12th chromosome, which split in half.

His extreme height does have benefits — he told CNN that “you don’t get picked on as much.” It does make it difficult to do the normal stuff that kids — and adults — do. Brenden said that he has a hard time fitting into cars and that he often attracts the curious stares of strangers.

According to ABC News, Brenden’s shoe size is a whopping 18, and he has to sit sideways at his school desk so his knees won’t knock it over. His mom, Debbie Ezell, said her son has a team of doctors who watch over his still-growing body.

Ezell told ABC that her son’s extreme height causes other medical issues, like fatty tumors, unusually large joints and even extra teeth. According to ABC, he had 12 extraneous teeth removed over the summer.

Brenden’s dad, Willie Adams, told ABC that his son was a typical infant when he was born, weighing in at 7 pounds, 3 ounces. His height at birth? A pretty normal 19-and-a-half inches. Ezell told the network that it wasn’t until Brenden’s two-month check-up that the doctor noticed something different about her baby boy.

“They said, these measurements just aren’t right, he’s too long,” Ezell told ABC. “And at four months, he had all of his teeth.”

Adams and Ezell then got news that every parent fears — the doctors didn’t know what was causing Brenden’s extreme growth.

Dr. Melissa Parisi, a geneticist at Children’s Hospital in Seattle, Wash., has been treating the boy since he was just 4 years old.

“I still haven’t seen anyone like Brenden,” Parisi told ABC, adding that when she began seeing him, Brenden was already “the size of a typical 8-year-old boy.”

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