Abstract
Research on life course epidemiology and the fetal and childhood origins of chronic disease has grown steadily during the past two decades. It has long been observed that height, a stable marker of early childhood conditions, has a strong negative association with all-cause mortality but heterogeneous association with cause-specific mortality. In their meta-analysis, the Emerging Risk Factors Collaboration 1 provides one of the most systematic and comprehensive pieces of evidence of these associations to date, overall and for a large number of causes. These robust findings confirm what has been previously reported in single studies and systematic reviews (e.g. the negative association between height and coronary heart disease) and add clarity where results were previously discrepant (e.g. pancreatic cancer) or lacking (e.g. bladder cancer). The range of sensitivity analyses provided gives further confidence in the reported associations. A particularly noteworthy finding is that of similar associations for men and women, whereas previous studies found effect modification by gender. 2 Although income was not measured, and residual bias due to this and other omitted or poorly measured covariates are a concern, these findings are consistent with what we know: the association between height and morbidity/mortality is robust to adjustment, including adjustment for socioeconomic position. 3 The same has been found for the association between height and intergenerational outcomes, 4 although the association between height and non-health components of well-being may be largely explained by income and education. 5 In contrast, there is evidence that the association between traditional measures of socio-economic position and health outcomes is overestimated when height is not included in analytic models. 6
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