Could Your Height Influence Your Risk Of Heart Disease?

First Posted: Apr 10, 2015 12:34 AM EDT
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New findings published in the New England Journal of Medicine show that short stature could influence the likelihood of developing heart disease.

For instance, every 2.5-inch difference in height influences coronary heart disease risk by a significant 13.5 percent, meaning that someone who is 5-fee-6 inches tall has a 32 percent lower risk of developing heart disease than someone who is just 5 feet tall alone.

"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 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 added.

Researchers examined data from the CADIoGRAM+C4D consortium, which encompassed over 200,000 patients with and without coronary heart disease. Furthermore, they analyzed 180 genetic variants that also influenced height and were 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," concluded Professor Jeremy Pearson, Associate Medical Director at the BHF, which partly funded the study.

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