Your result, the one DNA position behind it, and what the research says.
5/10 confidence.
Two people of the same height can be built quite differently: one long in the leg and short in the body, the other the reverse. Researchers measure this as sitting height ratio, how much of your standing height is still there when you sit down. It is partly heritable and partly set by childhood nutrition, because the legs grow fastest in infancy and early childhood, before the trunk's own spurt, so conditions in those years leave their mark on leg length in particular. This position is not inside a gene. It sits in the stretch between FGFR4 and NSD1, and it turned up in a genome-wide scan of body proportion rather than through anyone working out a mechanism. The link to proportion specifically is weaker than the one to waist measurements at the same position, and falls short of the usual genome-wide bar. The neighboring genes are candidates, not the explanation.
Good to know: Sitting height ratio is how researchers describe leg length relative to total height. Legs grow fastest in early childhood, which is why conditions then affect this proportion strongly. This marker sits between two genes rather than inside one, so no mechanism is established.
Fun fact: Sitting height ratio is used in population studies precisely because legs are the part of height most sensitive to conditions during growth.
Discovery: Sitting height ratio was mapped in genome-wide studies of body proportion.
The single variant behind this trait
Gene: FGFR4
Location: Chr 5:177,100,576
dbSNP rs6556301
Content updated September 2026.
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