Abstract
Background: Previous studies link tall stature with a reduced ischemic stroke risk. One theory posits that tall people have larger cerebral artery lumens and therefore have a lower plaque occlusion risk than those who are short. Previous studies have not critically evaluated the associations between height and cerebral artery structure independent of confounding factors. Methods: The hypothesis linking stature with cerebral artery lumen size was tested in 231 adults by measuring the associations between height and common carotid artery diameter (CCAD) and intima–media thickness (IMT) after controlling for recognized vascular influencing factors (e.g., adiposity, blood pressure, plasma lipids, etc.). Results: Height remained a significant CCAD predictor across all developed multiple regression models. These models predict a ~0.03 mm increase in CCAD for each 1-cm increase in height in this sample. This magnitude of CCAD increase with height represents over a 60% enlargement of the artery’s lumen area across adults varying in stature from short (150 cm) to tall (200 cm). By contrast, IMT was non-significantly correlated with height across all developed regression models. Conclusions: People who are tall have a larger absolute CCAD than people who are short, while IMT is independent of stature. These observations potentially add to the growing cardiovascular literature aimed at explaining the lower risk of ischemic strokes in tall people.
Highlights
There is a longstanding observation that tall people are at a lower risk of developing an ischemic stroke compared to their short counterparts [1,2,3,4,5]
Systolic common carotid artery diameter (CCAD) or intima–media thickness (IMT) were set as dependent variables in multiple regression models with sex, age, height, plasma glucose and lipids, and blood pressure set as potential covariates
While arteries likely scale in size with height, an intuition confirmed by previous studies [15,16], a critical test of this hypothesis for the clinically accessible CCAD was lacking as other potential lumen size determinants were largely uncontrolled for
Summary
There is a longstanding observation that tall people are at a lower risk of developing an ischemic stroke compared to their short counterparts [1,2,3,4,5]. In the 1996 study by Njolstad et al [4], an inverse dose–response association was observed between height and stroke risk in a sample of middle-aged Finnish men and women. Following adjustment for potentially confounding variables, the risk of stroke was lower by one-half in the tallest quartile of men compared to the shortest quartile of men and by two-thirds in the women. Previous studies link tall stature with a reduced ischemic stroke risk. Previous studies have not critically evaluated the associations between height and cerebral artery structure independent of confounding factors
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