Adult height and risk of death from all-cause, cardiovascular and cancer specific disease: The Rural Chinese Cohort Study

Abstract Background and Aims We aimed to evaluate the sex-specific association of height and all-cause and cause-specific mortality in rural Chinese adults. Methods and Results A total of 17,263 participants (10,448 women) ≥18 years old were randomly enrolled during 2007-2008 and followed up during 2013-2014. Sex-specific hazard ratios (HRs) for the height-mortality association, assessed in quintiles or 5-cm increments, were calculated by Cox proportional-hazards models. For both men and women, tall participants showed a baseline prevalence of high levels of socioeconomic factors including income and education, but low systolic blood pressure and total cholesterol level. During a median of 6.01 years of follow-up, 620 men (in 39,993.45 person-years) and 490 women (in 61,590.10 person-years) died. With increasing height, the risk of all-cause mortality decreased in a curvilinear shape after adjustment for baseline age, socioeconomic and behavioral factors, and anthropometric and laboratory measurements. For men, height was inversely associated with all-cause mortality (HR per 5-cm increase: 0.89, 95% CI: 0.83-0.96) and cardiovascular mortality (HR per 5-cm increase: 0.81, 95% CI: 0.72-0.91). For women, height was inversely associated with all-cause mortality (HR per 5-cm increase: 0.88, 95% CI: 0.81-0.96) and other mortality (HR per 5-cm increase: 0.82, 95% CI: 0.71-0.96). Conclusions Our study demonstrated a sex-specific inverse effect of height on mortality from different major causes in rural Chinese adults.