New research suggests a person's height could influence their likelihood of developing heart disease, and short people have the highest risk.
The findings showed every 2.5-inch difference in height influenced coronary heart disease risk by a significant 13.5 percent, the University of Leicester reported. This means someone who is 5-feet-6- inches tall has a 32 percent lower risk of heart disease than someone who is 5 feet tall.
"For more than 60 years it has been known that there is an inverse relationship between height and risk of coronary heart disease," said Professor Sir Nilesh Samani, British Heart Foundation Professor of Cardiology at the University of Leicester. "It is not clear whether this relationship is due to confounding factors such as poor socioeconomic environment, or nutrition, during childhood that on the one hand determine achieved height and on the other the risk of coronary heart disease, or whether it represents a primary relationship between shorter height and more coronary heart disease."
The recent study, which consisted of genetic research, showed the link between height and risk of heart disease is a primary relationship and is not caused by confounding factors.
"The beauty about DNA is that it cannot be modified by one's lifestyle or socio-economic conditions. Therefore if shorter height is directly connected with increased risk of coronary heart disease one would expect that these variants would also be associated with coronary heart disease and this is precisely what we found," Samani said.
To make their findings the researchers looked at data from the CADIoGRAM+C4D consortium, which encompassed more than 200,000 patients with and without coronary heart disease. They analyzed 180 genetic variants that influence height and have also been linked to coronary heart disease.
"By using the power of very large scale genetic studies, this research is the first to show that the known association between increased height and a lower risk of coronary heart disease is at least in part due to genetics, rather than purely down to nutrition or lifestyle factors. The team has identified several ways that naturally occurring gene variations can control both a person's height and their risk of coronary heart disease. Further exploration of these genes may suggest new ways to reduce the risk of heart and circulatory disease," said Professor Jeremy Pearson, Associate Medical Director at the BHF, which partly funded the study.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.
