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A century of trends in adult human height

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-12-06, 14:49 authored by NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC), Oonagh MarkeyOonagh Markey
© NCD Risk Factor Collaboration.Being taller is associated with enhanced longevity, and higher education and earnings. We reanalysed 1472 population-based studies, with measurement of height on more than 18.6 million participants to estimate mean height for people born between 1896 and 1996 in 200 countries. The largest gain in adult height over the past century has occurred in South Korean women and Iranian men, who became 20.2 cm (95% credible interval 17.5-22.7) and 16.5 cm (13.3- 19.7) taller, respectively. In contrast, there was little change in adult height in some sub-Saharan African countries and in South Asia over the century of analysis. The tallest people over these 100 years are men born in the Netherlands in the last quarter of 20th century, whose average heights surpassed 182.5 cm, and the shortest were women born in Guatemala in 1896 (140.3 cm; 135.8- 144.8). The height differential between the tallest and shortest populations was 19-20 cm a century ago, and has remained the same for women and increased for men a century later despite substantial changes in the ranking of countries.

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

eLife

Volume

5

Issue

2016JULY

Citation

NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC), 2016. A century of trends in adult human height. eLife, 5, e13410.

Publisher

eLife Sciences Publications Ltd

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2016-06-07

Publication date

2016-07-26

Copyright date

2016

Notes

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by eLife Sciences Publications Ltd under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

eISSN

2050-084X

Language

  • en

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