New Delhi: A large genetic study has found that a person’s height may affect the risk of several common health conditions in adulthood. Important findings include a link between height and a lower risk of coronary heart disease, and a link between height and a higher risk for peripheral neuropathy and circulatory disorders.
The results appeared in the June 2, 2022, issue of the journal PLOS Genetics.
Dr. Sreedharan Raghavan of the VA Eastern Colorado Health Care System, who led the study, described the results as “an important contribution to understanding height related clinical conditions from an epidemiological perspective.” More research is needed before the findings could lead to a change in clinical care, says Raghavan. However, the results highlight an association between altitude and clinical conditions that affect veterans’ lives, he explains. “The broad scope of our study yielded a list of clinical conditions associated with genetically predisposed height. In other words, these are conditions for which height may be a risk factor or a protective factor, regardless of other environmental conditions that may be present.” Height can also affect health.”
Height is not generally considered a risk factor for diseases. But previous research has shown links between how tall a person is and their likelihood of experiencing a number of health conditions. What is not well understood is whether this correlation has a biological basis or is due to other factors.
How tall someone is as an adult is partly due to the genes they inherit from their parents. But environmental factors such as nutrition, socioeconomic status and demographics (for example, age or gender) also play a role in determining ultimate height. This is why the relationship between altitude and disease risk can be difficult to determine.
To explore this relationship, VA researchers looked at genetic and medical data from more than 280,000 veterans enrolled in MVP. They compared these data to a list of 3,290 genetic variants associated with height from a recent genome analysis.
They found that risk levels of 127 different medical conditions could be linked to genetically predicted height in white patients. Because black patients are under-represented in genetic studies, little data are available on this population. But in this analysis, medical symptoms associated with height were generally consistent across black and white patients. About 21% of the Veterans in the MVP study were Black. At least 48 links identified in White patients also held true for Black patients. According to the researchers, all of the most important findings — height being linked to a lower risk of coronary heart disease and a higher risk of atrial fibrillation, peripheral neuropathy and circulatory disorders — were found in both black and white participants.
Overall, genetically predicted height was associated with both low and high disease risk, depending on position. Being tall protects people from cardiovascular problems. Studies link being tall to a lower risk of high blood pressure, high cholesterol and coronary heart disease. But the risk of atrial fibrillation was higher in the taller participants. These connections have been shown before in previous research.
Conversely, being tall may increase the risk of most of the non-cardiovascular conditions considered in the study. This was especially true of peripheral neuropathy and circulatory disorders involving the nerves.
Peripheral neuropathy is damage to nerves outside the brain and spinal cord, especially in the limbs. Earlier studies have linked height with slower nerve conduction and nerve problems. The MVP study confirms this link by using genetic tools to suggest a higher risk of nerve problems in tall people.
Researchers linked the genetically predicted height to conditions such as erectile dysfunction and urinary retention, both of which have been linked to neuropathy.
Raghavan called the findings on peripheral neuropathy “particularly interesting.” He discussed this finding with clinical colleagues who often see patients with peripheral neuropathy. Raghavan’s colleagues confirmed that tall people often show the worst neuropathy, but they were not aware of other studies describing this relationship.
Conditions such as cellulitis, skin abscesses, chronic leg ulcers and osteomyelitis were also linked to height. Being tall increases the risk of circulatory conditions such as varicose veins and thrombosis – blood clots in the veins.
Altitude can also increase the risk of neuropathy or other conditions involving circulation. Toe and foot deformities, conditions that can be caused by the increased weight of tall people, were more common in people whose genetics predicted they would be tall.
The study also showed that height increased the risk of asthma and non-specific nerve disorders in women, but not in men.
Taken together, the results suggest that height may be an unrecognized but biologically important and irreversible risk factor for many common conditions, especially those that affect the extremities, according to the researchers. They say it may be useful to consider a person’s height when assessing risk and disease surveillance.
More work needs to be done before this research can be translated into clinical care, says Raghavan. “I think our findings are a first step towards disease risk assessment in which we identify conditions for which altitude may actually be a risk factor,” he explains. “Future work will need to evaluate whether incorporating height into disease risk assessments can inform strategies for modifying other risk factors for specific conditions.”
Future work will also focus on the possible mechanisms that link these health conditions to height.
Researchers from several VA health care centers participated in the study, including, but not limited to, Dr. Tim Asims of the VA Palo Alto Health Care System; Dr. Yan Sun from the Atlanta VA Medical Center; and Dr. Chris O’Donnell, one of MVP’s national leaders, first with the VA Boston Healthcare System and now with Novartis.
MVP is a national research program to explore how genes, lifestyle and military exposures affect health and disease. Since its launch in 2011, more than 885,000 Veterans have joined MVP, making it one of the world’s largest programs on genetics and health.
Raghavan points out that such studies would not be possible without MVP. “MVP is extremely important for these types of studies,” he said. “By linking clinical data to genetic data, we can study clinical outcomes that are not typically collected in other types of observational cohort data. For example, our study found some strong associations — peripheral neuropathy, venous insufficiency, osteomyelitis.” , Ulcers along the foot – in a lot of other data that would not be routinely collected include genetics. It is helpful for relationship research and in translating research findings to clinical care.
“Beyond its sheer number of participants, MVP also allows for research previously impossible due to the participation of many different groups of veterans across the country. Another important contribution of MVP is its diversity,” Raghavan explained. The majority of participants are white, with a large number of black and Hispanic participants, which have been underrepresented in genetic studies in the past.”