You may not make the women's basketball team but British researchers have found an advantage to being short in stature — it significantly reduces your risk of developing cancer.
To discover whether height influenced cancer risk, researchers at Oxford University followed 1.3 million middle-aged British women for 10 years.
Surprisingly, they found that the risk of cancer in women jumps 16 percent with each 10cm increase in height.
And it's not only one type of cancer, taller women were found to be more likely to develop cancers of the breast, ovary, uterus and bowel, as well as leukemia and melanoma.
Researchers are unsure why height is related to cancer development but lead researcher Dr Jane Green told MSNBC: "The link between height and cancer risk seems to be common to many different kinds of cancer and in different people, suggesting that there may be a basic common mechanism, perhaps acting early in people's lives when they are growing."
It's unclear whether these findings also relate to cancer in men.
Dr Green and her colleagues concluded that, while people can't change their height and being tall has its advantages, such as being less likely to develop heart disease, the findings are a step forward in the search for a cure.
"The importance of our findings is that they may help us understand how cancers develop," she said.
The study was published in The Lancet Oncology.
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