Statistics show that short people find it difficult to get elected to public office, find a mate, and make less money. A new study has some more bad news for short people.
According to an analysis published in the European Heart Journal, shortest short people (men under 5 feet 5 inches and women fewer than 5 feet) are roughly 50 percent more likely to have a heart attack or die from heart complications when compared to the tallest people.
From Edition.cnn.com:
A new study suggests that it gets worse: The shortest short people — men under 5 feet 5 inches and women under 5 feet — are roughly 50 percent more likely than the tallest people to have a heart attack or die from heart disease, according to an analysis published in the European Heart Journal.
Why? Probably due to a combination of underlying factors that contribute to both short stature and poor heart health, such as age, the researchers say.
“Older people are shorter,” the lead author of the study, Tuula Paajanen, MD, a researcher at the University of Tampere, in Finland, points out in an e-mail. “Also, you have to remember that height is at least a combination of genetics, socioeconomic status, and nutritional factors. So when using height we are also thinking about some confounding factors.”
Paajanen and her colleagues analyzed data from 52 high-quality studies that included more than 3 million people. Hundreds of studies dating back to 1951 have explored the link between short height and heart disease, but this is the first systematic review and analysis of all the good studies on the subject.
Michael Lauer, MD, the director of the division of cardiovascular sciences at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, however said that the findings are hardly any proof that people with short height are more prone to heart diseases.
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Tags: health, heart attack, heart health, short people
