Massive New Study Confirms Being Tall Puts You at Risk of a Bunch of Diseases

The extra inches above the crowd can come at a price. Being tall is associated with a number of diseases.

An international team of researchers compared measures of height, both genetic and physical, with the presence of more than a thousand traits in more than 280,000 US adults.

According to the study's lead author, adult height may affect over 100 clinical traits, including several conditions associated with poor outcomes and quality of life.

height may be an unrecognized risk factor for a number of common conditions in adults.

Scientists have known for a long time that tall people are more likely to get cancer and have other health problems.

It's not that shorter people have a better chance of having health problems.

It's not clear whether these health challenges are related to the biology of height in particular, or the result of environmental conditions such as poor nutrition, which can affect someone's stature.

This latest analysis made use of genetic data linked to the clinical records of more than 200,000 White and 50,000 Black adults from the US Veteran Affairs' million veteran program.

The team tried to match thousands of genetic variations known to influence a person's height with more than a thousand characteristics associated with disease.

A comparison was also done based on measured heights.

The new analysis can be considered the largest of its kind because previous studies looked at no more than 50 genes.

According to the results, taller people have it easier when it comes to cardiovascular conditions such as hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and coronary heart disease, at the cost of being more prone to atrial fibrillations.

Infections of the skin and bone were added to the risk list.

The team found that asthma and peripheral nerve disorders were associated with increased height in women but not men, thanks to the sample size.

It's less likely that we can point a finger at environmental causes, or even the influence of body mass, if we draw tighter connections between genes for height.

There are additional studies that could help iron out the cause and identify the underlying biochemistry.

Future research would help to bolster some of the study's weaknesses by using more relevant genetic libraries that expand beyond a European ancestry and sampling a wider part of the population to include more from Black and Hispanic populations.

Even though there isn't much we can do about our height, knowing how it relates to our health could help us keep an eye out.

The research was published in a genetics journal.