It's a common myth that tall people have larger lungs requiring more effort to breathe or that their hearts work harder to pump blood. While these beliefs are unfounded, there's a curious discussion in scientific circles about height and lifespan. Contrary to what we see in the animal kingdom, where larger animals often have longer lifespans (like elephants compared to rats), in humans, the correlation seems to be the opposite.
You might begin to wonder how any atom of truth can be in that; would you say that someone taller than I am have a shorter lifespan than myself who is just 4 foot 2 inches (just joking). You might begin to wonder why this is different in humans, when animals that are large tend to live longer than smaller animals, for instance Elephants tends to live longer than earthworm, or a rat with a lifespan of about 12 months to a blue whale with a lifespan of about 90 years. So why will it be different in humans.
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Well, if you are tall, you should not worry because this doesn't mean you have a shorter life expectancy compared to your short friend, but multiple studies have shown relationships between increased height ans reduced life expectancy. According to a publication titled "Do "big guys" really die younger? An examination of height and lifespan in former professional basketball players" released in 2017 looked at more than 3300 NBA players as well as ABA players within 1920 and 2017, and realized that there was a gap between the life expectancy in tall and short players where it was visible that the average lifespan for the shortest players were 75 years while the tallest players had a life expectancy of 56 years.
The result of that article can get your heart beating and we wouldn't want to depend on the result from one study to conclude on a very sensitive matter like this, so I decided to look at another study Where military men in Italy between the years of 1866 and 1915 were studied and it came to be that shorter recruits lived longer than their taller comrades.
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Let's believe that we do not want to look at the records of active soldiers, a study which consisted of 373 male veterans who died in Veterans Administration in San Diago between the years 1984 and 1988 showed that men who were below 5'6" lived 4.95 years more than their taller counterparts and people who were lesser than 5'5" lived 7.46 years longer than men taller than 5'9".
While we might say that this studies have a point, it is no doubt that they only look at men when making this observation, also people are different with different habits either bad or good. Also other factors like genetics can also affect humans, making the studies a little less accurate but then, another survey was done on over 22 million adult in Korea following them for a 5 years period. After 5 years, less than 800 thousand people were diagnosed with cancer, and saw height to be a major factor in the patients with cancer as there were a high ratio of tall population among the cancer patients meaning they were highly vulnerable to cancer.
Dr. Leonard Nunney's research sheds light on this by linking height to cancer risk. According to his findings, for every 10cm increase in height above 5'7" for men and 5'3" for women, there's a 10% increase in cancer risk. This could be due to higher rates of cell division in taller individuals and elevated levels of insulin-like growth factor 1 (IgF 1), which plays a role in cell division.
While height and lifespan correlations in humans seem to contradict patterns observed in the animal kingdom, it's essential to approach these findings with a nuanced understanding. Lifestyle, genetics, and environmental factors play significant roles in determining an individual's health and longevity. As research continues, we may uncover more complexities in the intriguing relationship between our stature and our lifespan.
Reference
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22582890/
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full
https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41416-018-0371-8#Sec11
https://www.testing.com/tests/insulin-growth-factor-1-igf-1/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3614012/