It regrows to the exact size it was, no extra skin no less skin. Unless of course it’s a serious injury but I’m talking minor skin removal. Obviously gunshot wounds, flesh eating bacteria and animal bites don’t do this because of scar tissue I assume but even with them it’s remarkable how close it comes to filling in the area. How does the body know when to stop growing the new tissue to fill it in and how come with these deeper wounds the body has a harder time figuring it out?
In: Biology
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Basically, the cells will continue duplicating endlessly until they are touching other cells of the same type, which triggers a stop function in them.
If you chop a chunk of your finger there is no way your body regenerates a new fingertip.
If you get a small cut then skin Bridges itself and starts to reproduce as always “pushing” any damage out. For a deep cut or a chopped limb the body just produces an ugly fiber which closes the wound in the shortest way possible.
Obviously not a doctor nor is English my first language.
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Each layer of your limb that got cut will reconstruct until the injury is gapped over. It’s possible to do with small injuries because the multiple layers (muscle, fat, dermis and epidermis) all take care of themselves. Larger injuries may have certain layers not heal entirely before another does, leaving indents or disfigurement. Bone obviously does not regenerate when severed, although the layers of fat and skin can still typically regenerate around it.
Basically your body generates skin by generating cells at a base layer pushing them up. As they are pushed up they die, and eventually slough off (get brushed off). When you remove a chunk of skin in an injury, you expose a lower layer of your skin. Your body heals the wound, but your body continues as per usual with the base layer creating cells underneath and pushing them up until the wound bed sloughs off. This reveals a new layer of skin that will also sometime in the future die and get sloughed off. The only reason the skin at your wound doesn’t overgrow is because your regular skin doesn’t overgrow everyday!
Seeing a lot of answers here that kind of answer the question. I’m a wound care nurse so my studies include this specific topic.
Typically your skin cells (made up of multiple layers) grow vertically to maintain your intact skin barrier. When you have a wound the body’s reaction to this “breach” is to essentially notify the skin cells surrounding the damaged skin. When the cells get this signal they stop growing vertically and start growing horizontally from the wound edges inward.
When the skin cells meet in the middle (so the wound is no longer open) they re-program themselves to start growing upward again instead of side to side. In doing so, they start to strengthen the skin to return it back to its normal elasticity and protective ability.
Depending on how many layers of skin are affected (how deep the wound is), the body will either be able to make a pretty smooth skin cover with all surrounding tissue structures intact (hair follicles, nerves, etc) or it will rely on scar tissue to do the best it can to get everything closed up. The deeper the wound, the more likely it will heal with scar tissue (which isn’t as strong and uniform as regular skin). When scar tissue is involved, damaged structures within the skin layers can not be preserved or repaired.
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