Short people more likely to develop heart disease

Scientists have uncovered a link between people's height and their vulnerability to heart disease.

A new study by the University of Tampere (UT), Finland says that short people are more at risk of developing heart disease than tall people.

The study looked at evidence from 52 studies of over three million people and found that short adults were approximately 1.5 times more likely to develop cardiovascular heart disease (CVD) and die from it than tall people. This appeared to be true for both men and women.

Tuula Paajanen, researcher in forensic medicine at UT said that over the years there had been a number of studies that had provided conflicting evidence on whether shortness was associated with heart disease.

"The first report on the inverse association between coronary heart disease (CHD) and height was published in 1951," Paajanen said.

"Since then, the association between short stature and cardiovascular diseases has been investigated in more than 1,900 papers. However, until now, no systematic review and meta-analysis has been done on this topic," the researcher added.

Due to the many different ways that previous studies have investigated the association between height and heart disease, Paajanen and her colleagues decided to compare the shortest group to the tallest group instead of using a fixed height limit.

From the total of 1,900 papers, the researchers selected 52 that fulfilled all their criteria for inclusion in their study. These included a total of 3,012,747 patients. On average short people were below 160.5 cms high and tall people were over 173.9 cms.

When men and women were considered separately, on average short men were below 165.4 cms and short women below 153 cms, while tall men were over 177.5 cms and tall women over 166.4 cms.

Paajanen and her colleagues found that compared to those in the tallest group, the people in the shortest group were nearly 1.5 times more likely to die from CVD or CHD, or to live with the symptoms of CVD or CHD, or to suffer a heart attack, compared with the tallest people.

Looking at men and women separately, short men were 37 percent more likely to die from any cause compared with tall men, and short women were 55 percent more likely to die from any cause compared with their taller counterparts.

Paajanen said: "The results of this systematic review and meta-analysis suggest that height may be considered as a possible independent factor to be used in calculating people's risk of heart disease."

"Height is used to calculate body mass index, which is widely used to quantify risk of CHD," Paajanen added, according to a UT release.

Paajanen said short people should not be worried by her findings. "Height is only one factor that may contribute to heart disease risk, and whereas people have no control over their height, they can control their weight and lifestyle habits such as smoking, drinking and exercise," Paajanen concluded.

These findings were published in the Wednesday online edition of the European Heart Journal.

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