Short women usually wear high heels to seem taller, but they do not realize that being shorter has some advantages, one of them is a lower risk of having cancer.
Even though the reason is unknown, the study is real and has data to support it. Jane Green of the University of Oxford and her colleagues have been researching about this. They investigated a large group of middle-age women of about 1.3 million from England and Scotland and all participated in a "long-running study of women's health. Most of these women were followed about 9 years and through 2008, 97,000 of the women developed cancer.
"Being taller correlated with higher risk — roughly a 16 percent elevation for each 10 centimeter increase over 155 centimeters (aka 5’1”, the ceiling for women in the shortest group). Women whose heights fell outside the normal range — less than 120 cm (3’11”) or at least 200 cm (more than 6’5”) — were excluded."
Some traits were noticed in the group of taller women, they were less likely to smoke or be obese, tended to drink more alcohol, were financially better, tended to be more active, had fewer children, and had their first child at a later age. Although most of these traits are positive ones, there was another that was noticed, a negative one, that increasing height was related to increasing risk of colon, rectal, breast, endometrial, ovarian, kidney, skin, and central-nervous-systems cancers. Also, risk of leukemia, multiple myeloma, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma were higher in taller women than in shorter. During the investigation, the group of Jane Green investigated that smoking is not a related factor to height since 19% of the women had never smoked and only 11% were current smokers.
Other scientists, apart from Jane Green and her group have been researching about this topic, not only for women but for both, and have also found a correlation between increased risk of cancer and height. For every 10 centimeters, there is a 13% increase of the risk.
“The similarity of the height-associated relative risk for different cancers and in different populations suggests that a basic common mechanism, possibly acting in early life, might be involved,” Green and her colleagues conclude.
They can only suppose and create theories as to why this happens, but they still do not know. For example, one of the theories is that, since taller people have more cells than shorter people, the could have more chances of developing a "deleterious mutation".
What interested me about this article was the fact that I am a very tall person and it just got me kind of worried that I there is a higher possibility for me to have cancer. When I read the title of the article I decided to look more into it and found out one disadvantage of being tall that I had no idea existed and for once in my life I wish to be short. This article made me think about my future and I did not want to. It opened my eyes and made me think of that phrase "Knock on wood" so that it does not happen. I can draw connections to my life from this article because it is a concerning issue that affects all tall persons of the world and it should be something to raise awareness about. The area of interaction being used in this article is Health and Social Education because it talks about the well-being and health of women and men, short and tall.
Interesting article. I thought from the picture that you were going to connect cancer with wearing high heals. Great 1st article post.
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