January 16, 2007	Tuesday	Zilhaj 25, 1427

LOS ANGELES: Conventional wisdom has it that taller men make more money, get more dates and are more likely to win a presidential election.

Shorter women aren’t taken seriously, and boys and girls both suffer psychologically well into adulthood if they’ve grown up the shortest in their class. Right?

Well, maybe … or maybe not. What people thought they knew about the height advantage doesn’t always hold up to the cold eye of psychological and sociological research. Experts are digging deeper into data on the consequences of shortness, and though recent studies validate some of society’s long-held assumptions about height, others are getting chipped away — even dismissed.

“There is little or no evidence that making short people taller changes their lives in any meaningful way,” says Dr Norman Fost, professor of pediatrics and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin Medical School.

The reality of the relative advantages of being tall is increasingly important because in 2003 the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of synthetic growth hormone for kids with idiopathic short stature, or shortness for no apparent medical reason.

The treatment, an injection every day for many years, is expensive and not consistently covered by insurers. The average benefits — an increase of about two inches in height — are modest.

Although no one expects ill health consequences down the road, no one really knows for sure what might happen. And critics say all this risk and expense is aimed at altering healthy children who are objects of social prejudice, rather than attacking the prejudice itself.

“There’s still a widespread perception that male success is measured in stature,” says Dalton C. Conley, chairman of the sociology department at New York University. “But in terms of total income, earnings and occupational outcomes, the male height issue is really a red herring.”

Other widely held notions about short people do hold up. Based on history, there can be no doubt that Americans like their presidents tall. And on the dating scene, women go for taller men. When it comes to romance, height is often a deal-breaker.

Children who can be treated for idiopathic short stature are the shortest 1.2 per cent, measuring 2.25 or more standard deviations below the mean, according to FDA guidelines. That translates, for ten-year-old boys and girls, to four feet, one inch and to a projected adult height of less than four feet, 11 inches for females and less than five feet, three inches for males.

Some of these children are short simply because both parents are short. But, the FDA panel reasoned, maybe the parents, grandparents and on down the family line were short for some as-yet-unidentified medical reason. If children of short stature with a known medical diagnosis, such as growth hormone deficiency, can be treated to help them grow taller, children whose very short stature has no presently known cause should be allowed treatment too, it said.

Treatment with growth hormone helps some, but not all, children grow taller. Medical tests cannot predict in advance which children will respond. In general, growth hormone works best when started younger, given in higher doses and administered for longer periods of time. On average, treatment helps children grow a little taller — but not much. An analysis of studies published in 2002 in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine found that children with idiopathic short stature who were given growth hormone for an average of 5.3 years had an average gain of 1.6 to 2.4 inches in height over what had been predicted when they began the drug.

Body height in a mate is important to both sexes but even more important to women, according to a meta-analysis of eight studies by Charles Pierce, published in 1996 in the journal Social Behavior and Personality. He can only speculate about why women so strongly prefer their mates to be taller.

“It may be that the height of a male is positively associated with traits such as dominance, superiority, fearlessness, protectiveness, athleticism, physical strength, leadership and social power,” says Pierce, a business professor at the University of Memphis. “On average, women tend to find these traits appealing.”

As discouraging as that news might be to short people, it apparently doesn’t hurt them psychologically. David Sandberg, pediatric psychologist and director of child behavioral health at the University of Michigan, has spent decades studying the effect of short stature on psychological development. He has found none.

But the real nitty-gritty of the so-called height advantage is money. Tall men make more money.

That has been borne out by multiple studies, including one reported in the October 2004 Journal of Political Economy. Researchers reported that for white men in the United States, every additional inch of height is associated with a 1.8 per cent increase in wages.

The tallest quarter of the population earns 13 per cent more than the shortest quarter.—Dawn/The Los Angeles Times News Service