Discussing the primary objective of the study, lead author Terese Sara Høj Jørgensen, Assistant Professor at the Section of Social Medicine, Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, in Denmark, said: “We wanted to see if body height in young men is associated with diagnosis of dementia, while exploring whether intelligence test scores, educational level, and underlying environmental and genetic factors shared by brothers explain the relationship.
To put this into practice, Jørgensen and her colleagues analysed data on 666,333 Danish men born between 1939 and 1959, including 70,608 brothers and 7,388 twins, from Danish national registries.
They found a total of 10,599 men who developed dementia later in life.
Their adjusted analysis of this group showed that there was about a 10 percent reduction in the risk of developing dementia for about every six centimetres of height in individuals above the average height.
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