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[Title & authors         ]
Bull World Health Organ
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. 1992;70(2):259-67.

Impact of height and weight on life span

T T Samaras^  1 , L H Storms
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  * ^1 Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Diego.

  * PMID: 1600586
  * PMCID: PMC2393304

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Impact of height and weight on life span

T T Samaras et al. Bull World Health Organ. 1992.
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Bull World Health Organ
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. 1992;70(2):259-67.

Authors

T T Samaras^  1 , L H Storms

Affiliation

  * ^1 Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Diego.

  * PMID: 1600586
  * PMCID: PMC2393304

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Abstract

The study was conducted to evaluate one aspect of the entropy theory
of aging, which hypothesizes that aging is the result of increasing
disorder within the body, and which predicts that increasing mass
lowers life span. The first evaluation of the impact of human size on
longevity or life span in 1978, which was based on data for decreased
groups of athletes and famous people in the USA, suggested that
shorter, lighter men live longer than their taller, heavier
counterparts. In 1990, a study of 1679 decreased men and women from
the general American population supported these findings. In the
present study data on the height, weight, and age at death of 373 men
were obtained from records at the Veterans Administration Medical
Center, San Diego, CA, USA. Men of height 175.3 cm or less lived an
average of 4.95 years longer than those of height over 175.3 cm,
while men of height 170.2 cm or less lived 7.46 years longer than
those of at least 182.9 cm. An analysis by weight difference revealed
a 7.72-year greater longevity for men of weight 63.6 kg or less
compared with those of 90.9 kg or more. This corroborates earlier
evidence and contradicts the popular notion that taller people are
healthier. While short stature due to malnutrition or illness is
undesirable, our study suggests that feeding children for maximum
growth and physical development may not add to and may indeed be
harmful to their long-term health and longevity.

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