来源：《新科学家》
原文刊登日期：2022年6月2日
Being taller may increase your risk of developing nerve, skin and some heart diseases, according to the largest study linking height and disease to date. The findings suggest that height could be used as a risk factor to prioritise screening tests for those at greatest risk of certain diseases.
一项迄今为止规模最大的身高与疾病相关的研究表明，个子高可能会增加你患神经、皮肤和某些心脏病的风险。研究结果表明，身高可以作为一种风险因素，优先筛查某些疾病的高风险人群。
Your height as an adult is determined by thousands of gene variants in combination with environmental factors such as socioeconomic status. Previous research has attempted to separate out these effects by using genes alone to estimate a person’s “genetically predicted height”, and linked this to around 50 diseases, but the links between height and many other diseases were unexplored.
你成年后的身高是由数千个基因变体和社会经济地位等环境因素共同决定的。此前的研究曾试图通过单独使用基因来估计一个人的“基因预测身高”来区分这些影响，并将其与大约50种疾病联系起来，但身高和许多其他疾病之间的联系尚未研究。
Now, Sridharan Raghavan at the University of Colorado and his colleagues have analysed data from 323,793 former members of the US armed forces who had enrolled in a research programme designed to explore links between genes, environmental factors and disease.
现在，科罗拉多大学的Raghavan和同事分析了323793名前美国武装部队成员的数据，这些人参加了一个旨在探索基因、环境因素和疾病之间联系的研究项目。
The team looked at 3290 gene variants known to influence height and their association with over 1000 clinical traits. This confirmed that a higher genetically predicted height increases your risk of heart palpitations and circulatory problems. They also found that having genes linked to being taller was associated with a higher risk of developing nerve damage and infections of the skin and bones.
研究小组研究了3290个已知影响身高的基因变体，以及它们与1000多个临床特征的关联。这证实了基因预测的身高越高，患心悸和循环系统疾病的风险就越大。他们还发现，拥有与高个子有关的基因会增加神经损伤、皮肤和骨骼感染的风险。
“We used genetically predicted height to identify conditions truly associated with height – in other words, conditions that were unlikely to be associated with height due to correlations with other factors that affect both height and a clinical condition,” says Raghavan.
Raghavan说：“我们利用基因预测的身高来识别真正与身高相关的疾病——换句话说，那些由于与既影响身高又影响临床疾病的其他因素相关，因此不太可能与身高相关的疾病。”
The team then confirmed that these conditions had the same associations with the participants’ actual measured height, suggesting that measuring someone’s height could be a quick and easy way to determine their disease risk. The taller you are, the higher the risk would be.
研究小组随后证实，这些疾病与参与者的实际测量身高有相同的关联，这表明测量一个人的身高可能是确定他们患病风险的一种快速而简单的方法。你的身高越高，患病风险就越高。
“Genetically predicted height and measured height are well correlated, so in the clinic a tape measure would suffice,” says Raghavan. “Our findings are a first step towards potentially including height in disease risk assessment, in that we identify conditions for which height might truly be a risk factor.”
Raghavan说：“基因预测的身高和实际测量的身高有很好的相关性，所以在临床中，一根卷尺就足够了。我们的发现是将身高纳入疾病风险评估的第一步，因为我们发现了身高可能真正是风险因素的疾病。”
“A potential implication of this study is that some health-related tests may be done more for individuals who are… very tall,” says Tamar Sofer at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, but she says more research would be needed before using such tests in clinical practice.
哈佛大学陈曾熙公共卫生学院的塔玛·索弗说：“这项研究的一个潜在影响是，一些与健康有关的测试可能会对那些……非常高的人。”但她说，在将这些测试用于临床实践之前，还需要进行更多的研究。