It’s (I believe) documented that being taller is correlated with having a shorter lifespan. How tall do you have to be before this effect really kicks in?
This talks about the effect generallybut doesn’t have any metric for height vs lifespan.
Larry Byrd is apparently pretty mopey about this.
Huh! And I thought dwarfs had shorter lifespans.
When you forget to duck, and hit your head repeatedly. Makes for a shorter lifespan.
Pole workers and arborists seem pretty well set on 30 feet assuming you land on something solid.
I’ve never seen a 30 foot pole in a strip club.
While I can’t specifically answer the GQ, here’s a thread I asked a few years ago on the longevity of seven-footers. Since then, Richard Kiel died just short of his 74th birthday. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar will be 69 next month. Outside of them, and maybe a few others, you’re lucky to get out of your 50s.
Acromegaly is one cause of extreme height; Wikipedia says lifespan is normal with early treatment.
Gigantism has similar causes, and this site likewise claims normal lifespan with treatment, but notes that size may impact quality of life due to things like arthritis and muscle weakness.
Due to whatever particular disorder makes them short. People who are “just short” have normal lifespans and health.
It’s not so much a function of their height in itself as various pathological conditions that made some of them extremely tall - things like acromegaly or Marfan’s Syndrome.
I haven’t done a controlled statistical study on it, but men are taller than women, and have shorter lifespans (and are, in particular, more likely to have heart attacks). And there’s a direct relationship between height and the pressure the heart needs to produce, which would provide a plausible mechanism for such a link.
So it may well be that the point at which height starts causing health problems is in the neighborhood of six feet, or even shorter.
Short people got no reason to live…
While there are different causes of dwarfism, the wikipedia article on dwarfism states that in general they don’t have shorter lifespans.
[QUOTE=wikipedia]
Hypotonia, or low muscle tone, is common in dwarfs, but intelligence and lifespan are usually normal
[/QUOTE]
It’s not just conditions like Acromegaly that cause a shorter lifespan. Just being tall is apparently enough to shorten your lifespan.
In general, being tall is associated with being more healthy. I found several NIH articles that contradicted this (except of course when malnutrition causes a short height), and all of them expressed concern that our attempts to raise taller children, thinking that they are healthier, will actually have the opposite effect.
Thanks. Now I’ve got that song stuck in my head.
When you find yourself at negative 6 feet.
How depressing.
When you walk into a ceiling fan.
Durin lived to like 500 or so.
Wasn’t there just a whole spate of articles about how being shorter raises your heart attack risk?
Google height+heart+attack.
Being firmly in the normal part of the curve is the best place to be. Most of the time.
There is no specific point but yes, in general shortness is associated with slower aging in general and lower cancer risk in particular, but as noted increased heart disease risk.
Huh, I wonder what the mechanism for that would be, then.