Cancer among postmenopausal women has been linked by a new study to higher a risk for taller candidates, NBC News reported.

The study, published Thursday in Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers and Prevention, surveyed American women, but similar reviews have analyzed other western populations like the U.K., Canada and Asia and had comparable results.

"There had been several previous studies but there hadn't been much done in North America," said lead author Dr. Thomas E. Rohan, chair and professor of epidemiology and population health at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York.

The research team found cancer sites included the colorectum, colon, rectum, breast, endometrium, ovary, kidney, thyroid, melanoma and multiple myeloma.

"We found that there was a strong, significant association between height and cancer risk, both for all cancers combined and for several specific cancer sites," Rohan said.

The study found that, for every four inches of height, risk of cancer increased by about 13 percent. The study surveyed 144,701 American women aged 50-79. The women all participated in the Women's Health Initiative, a long-term research program sponsored by the National Institute of Health since 1991.

The research team also took into account other factors such as body weight, ethnicity, smoking, alcohol intake, cancer screening and hormone therapy use.

University of Oxford epidemiologist Dr. Jane Green said the results do not only apply to women.

"This study is in women, our study was in women, but when we looked at studies of men as well, it is very similar," she said. "It may suggest something interesting about how cancer develops in general."

Rohan admitted not knowing why height was associated with health risks like cancer and they could only speculate.

One theory that Green said did not warrant scientific attention because it does not offer an explanation to how cancer develops is that taller people simply have more cells. This would mean that having more cells means there is a higher chance some of them would mutate into cancer.

"An obvious candidate is nutrition in early life," said Rohan. "There has been a secular trend in the last century or so of increasing adult height, and that has been attributed to improvement in early childhood nutrition and to improvements in hygiene as well."