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Study Finds that a Woman's Height May be Directly Linked to Cancer Risk

A large study of more than a million women has revealed that height may be directly linked to an increased risk of total and location-specific cancers, an effect that was still seen following adjustment for confounding personal and socioeconomic variables. The results of the ana lysis, published by authors from Oxford University (UK) online in Lancet Oncology, add to epidemiological evidence suggesting that height may be linked to cancer growth mechanisms and the authors hope that it will lead to increased understanding of risk factors in cancer development. Although there have been studies examining the association between overall height and cancer risk in the past, doubts existed about the validity of the effect. Speaking to Women’s Health, the lead author of the study Jane Green (Oxford University), explained why the authors chose to analyze the effect of height in cancer: “Most individual studies were too small and/or lacking in detail on other risk factors (e.g., smoking) for a clear picture to emerge as to whether the link was specific to some cancers, or seen for all; and this was so particularly for cancer incidence, rather than mortality.” The large ana lysis used data from the Million Women Study, a national UK-based cohort of more than a million women over 50 years of age, which aims to help elucidate how certain factors affect the incidence of disease in this age group. The recently published study analyzed 1,297,124 women for a median of 9 years per women, during which time, over 97,000 cancer cases were identified. When performing regression ana lysis, the relative risk for total cancer incidence was found to the 16% higher for each 10 cm increase in height. This was true for most major sites and was significant for many common cancer locations including the rectum, breast, ovary, endometrium and the brain. Interestingly, the relative risk did not vary signif icantly when considering socioeconomic status or other personal characteristics, although the effect was less pronounced in smokingrelated cancers. Talking to Women’s Health, Green theorized that this may be caused by the influence of height being “swamped by the larger effect of smoking”, which may explain some inconsistencies in previous studies of this type.