New research suggests a link between height and cancer, HealthDay reported.
Researchers from the Karolinska Institutet and University of Stockholm found that cancer risk increase with height in both Swedish men and women. This long-term study is the largest carried out on the association between height and cancer in both genders.
"To our knowledge, this is the largest study performed on linkage between height and cancer including both women and men," Dr. Emelie Benyi, a PhD student at Karolinska Institutet who led the study, said in a statement.
For the study, researchers examined 5.5 million men and women in Sweden, born between 1938 and 1991 and with adult heights ranging between 100 cm and 225 cm. They followed the group of individuals from 1958 or from the age of 20 until the end of 2011, and found that for every 10 cm of height, the risk of developing cancer increased by 18 percent in women and 11 percent in men.
Additionally, taller women had a 20 percent greater risk of developing breast cancer, whilst the risk of developing melanoma increased by approximately 30 percent per 10 cm of height in both men and women, BBC News reported.
"It should be emphasized that our results reflect cancer incidence on a population level," Benyi said in a statement. "As the cause of cancer is multifactorial, it is difficult to predict what impact our results have on cancer risk at the individual level."
Researchers are now planning on investigating how mortality from cancer and other causes of death are associated with height within the Swedish population.
The findings were presented Thursday at the 54th Annual European Society for Paediatric Endocrinology Meeting.
