Taller women more likely to get cancer, large study finds

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/taller-women-more-likely-get-cancer-large-study-finds-6C10746890

Barbara Mantel NBC News
July 25, 2013

The taller a postmenopausal woman is, the greater her risk for developing cancer, according to a new, large study of American women. Similar results have been found in other Western populations, including in the United Kingdom and Canada, and in Asia.

“There had been several previous studies but there hadn’t been much done in North America,” says Dr. Thomas E. Rohan, chair and professor of epidemiology and population health at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York. He's the senior author of the paper published Thursday in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

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Each 10 centimeter - about 4 inch - increase in height is associated with a 13 percent increase in overall cancer risk, according to his group’s analysis of 144,701 women aged 50 to 79 participating in the Women’s Health Initiative, a major, long-term research program established by the National Institutes of Health in 1991.

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“This study is in women, our study was in women, but when we looked at studies of men as well, it is very similar,” says Dr. Jane Green, a clinical epidemiologist at the University of Oxford, England and the lead author of the largest study to date of the link between height and cancer.

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n the meantime, tall people should not worry about their cancer risk, says Green. The association of height with cancer risk is significant but “modest,” she says, and being tall actually carries a lower risk of some other diseases, such as heart disease and stroke.