RESEARCH ARTICLE Height at Late Adolescence and Incident Diabetes among Young Men

Background Short stature was suggested as a risk factor for diabetes onset among middle age individu-als, but whether this is the case among young adults is unclear. Our goal was to assess the association between height and incident diabetes among young men. Methods and Findings Incident diabetes was assessed among 32,055 men with no history of diabetes, from the prospectively followed young adults of the MELANY cohort. Height was measured at two time points; at adolescence (mean age 17.4±0.3 years) and grouped according to the US-CDC percentiles and at young adulthood (mean age 31.0±5.6 years). Cox proportional haz-ards models were applied. There were 702 new cases of diabetes during a mean follow-up of 6.3±4.3 years. There was a significant increase in the crude diabetes incidence rate with decreasing adolescent height percentile, from 4.23 cases/104 person-years in the <10th per-centile group to 2.44 cases/104 person-years in the 75th percentile group. These results persisted when clinical and biochemical diabetes risk factors were included in multivariabl