London, June 09: Heart disease is discriminatory as it affects short people 50 percent more than tall people, a study on the relationship between height and mortality shows.
The first systematic review of three million people shows that height is a factor in coronary heart disease and short people are likely to die prematurely of heart disease.
Women under 153 centimeters and men under 165 centimeters are significantly more prone to heart problems than women taller than 166 centimeters and men taller than 173 centimeters.
The new study, published in the European Heart Journal on Wednesday, was conducted by Tuula Paajanen, MD, a researcher at the Department of Forensic Medicine at the University of Tampere in Finland, and her team.
"The reasons remain open to hypotheses. We hypothesize that shorter people have smaller coronary arteries and smaller coronary arteries may be occluded earlier in life due to factors that increase risk, such as a poorer socioeconomic background with poor nutrition and infections that result in poor foetal or early life growth," said Paajanen.
According to the researchers, the finding suggests that short height must be added to the list of known heart disease risk factors alongside obesity, advanced age and high cholesterol levels.
"However, recent findings on the genetic background of body height suggest that inherited factors, rather than speculative early-life poor nutrition or birth weight, may explain the association between small stature and an increased risk of heart disease in later life." Therefore, "we are carrying out further research to investigate these hypotheses," Paajanen concluded.
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