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American Journal of Epidemiology Advance Access originally published online on April 29, 2009
American Journal of Epidemiology 2009 170(1):53-64; doi:10.1093/aje/kwp088
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American Journal of Epidemiology © The Author 2009. Published by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

ORIGINAL CONTRIBUTIONS

Height and Site-specific Cancer Risk: A Cohort Study of a Korean Adult Population

Joohon Sung, Yun-Mi Song, Debbie A. Lawlor, George Davey Smith and Shah Ebrahim

Correspondence to Dr. Yun-Mi Song, Department of Family Medicine, Samsung Medical Center, Sunkyunkwan University, School of Medicine, Irwondong 50, Gangnamgu, Seoul, Korea 135-710 (e-mail: yunmisong{at}skku.edu).

Received for publication November 5, 2008. Accepted for publication March 17, 2009.

To evaluate the association between height and risk of cancer in an East Asian, middle-income population, the authors followed up a cohort of 788,789 Koreans (449,214 men and 339,575 women) aged 40–64 years for cancer incidence between 1994 and 2003. Cox proportional hazards regression analysis was used to evaluate the association. Each 5-cm increment in height was associated with 5% and 7% higher risk of all-sites cancer in men and women, respectively, after adjustment for age, body mass index, and behavioral and socioeconomic factors. When the associations were evaluated for site-specific cancers, a positive association was observed for cancer of the colon and thyroid in both men and women. Among gender-specific cancers, prostate cancer was positively associated with height in men. In women, there was a positive association between height and cancers of the breast and ovary, which did not change even after additional adjustment for reproductive factors. Although more clarification is needed for some site-specific cancers, the same positive association of height with cancer in a middle-income Korean population as found in high-income Western populations supports the influence of early life environment on cancer development in adulthood.

body height; Korea; neoplasms

Abbreviations: IGF, insulin-like growth factor; KCCR, Korea Central Cancer Registry


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