Where your DNA places you among other people, and the studies behind it.
Not tailored to your result, and not medical advice
Understand What a Height Score Means: Adult height is largely set by genetics and early-life environment, and it cannot be changed once growth plates close in the late teens. A polygenic height score reflects a statistical tendency, not a fixed outcome, and explains only part of height variation - roughly 40% in people of European ancestry and less in other groups. Treat it as informational; no health action is needed based on the score itself. Nature (Yengo et al., 2022)
Support Healthy Growth in Childhood: For children who are still growing, adequate calories, protein, and micronutrients such as calcium, vitamin D, zinc, and iron support reaching their genetic growth potential. Growth is fastest in the first two years and during puberty, and chronic undernutrition or repeated illness in these windows can blunt linear growth. Maternal & Child Nutrition
Prioritize Sleep During Growing Years: Growth hormone is released in pulses, with a large surge during deep (slow-wave) sleep, so consistent, sufficient sleep supports healthy growth in children and teens. School-age children generally need 9-12 hours and adolescents 8-10 hours per night. The link between sleep and growth is well documented but complex, and occasional poor sleep does not by itself stunt growth. Frontiers in Endocrinology (2024 review)
Track Children's Growth With Standard Charts: Rather than aiming for any specific height, the practical step in childhood is monitoring growth against standardized charts. Health providers use WHO and CDC growth charts to check that a child is following a healthy trajectory; a marked deviation from a child's own curve can prompt evaluation for nutritional or hormonal causes. CDC (growth charts)
Keep Health Associations in Perspective: Genetic studies suggest taller stature is associated with slightly lower coronary heart disease risk and slightly higher overall cancer risk - about a 14% lower and 18% higher odds, respectively, per standard-deviation increase in height. These are small, population-level associations and not a reason to change behavior; standard screening and prevention guidelines apply to everyone regardless of height. eLife (Howe et al., 2022)
How much of this is genetic?
Genetics explains 80% of why people differ in this trait. The rest is environment, daily habits and chance.
Heritability estimate: Silventoinen et al. 2003, Twin Res
Background and further reading
Adult standing height is a neutral physical measurement, not a health condition, and taller is not inherently healthier than shorter. It is one of the most studied human traits in genetics because it is easy to measure precisely and serves as a model for understanding how thousands of genes shape a complex trait. Average height differs by roughly 20 cm between the tallest and shortest national populations, a gap driven mostly by nutrition and childhood health rather than genetic differences between groups [3]. Height does show modest statistical associations with some health outcomes - genetic studies suggest taller stature is linked to slightly lower coronary heart disease risk and slightly higher overall cancer risk - but these are small, population-level patterns and not a reason to view any individual height as good or bad [4].
Genetic Basis: Twin and family studies place the heritability of adult height at roughly 80% in well-nourished populations, making it one of the most heritable human traits [1]. It is also extraordinarily polygenic. The 2014 GIANT consortium meta-analysis of about 253,000 people found 697 variants across 423 genomic loci, which together captured only about a fifth of height's heritability [5]. The 2022 study by Yengo and colleagues, the largest GWAS conducted at the time, analyzed roughly 5.4 million people and identified 12,111 independent common variants clustered in 7,209 genomic regions [2]. In people of European ancestry these variants explain about 40% of height variation and account for essentially all of the heritability detectable from common SNPs - a point the authors describe as saturation, meaning larger samples would add little [2]. Affected genes concentrate in pathways for skeletal growth and growth-plate biology, such as GH/IGF-1 signalling and cartilage and bone formation, illustrating how a complex trait can arise from thousands of tiny genetic effects rather than a few large ones [2].
Environmental Influences: High heritability does not mean height is fixed at conception - it means that among people sharing similar environments, most of the remaining differences trace to genetics. Childhood nutrition and health still set how fully a person's genetic potential is reached. Chronic malnutrition, recurrent infection, and untreated hormonal disorders during the growing years can substantially reduce adult height. A century of measurements shows global average height rose by around 10 cm over roughly a hundred years in many countries, with the largest gains where diets and public health improved most - a shift far too fast to be genetic and driven instead by better nutrition, cleaner water, and reduced childhood disease [3]. This is why high heritability does not imply that height is unchangeable across generations.
The published research behind your score, and the variants it draws on.
90 published scores from 16 studies
The height score combines 90 polygenic scores drawn from 16 published studies.
NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC). A century of trends in adult human height. eLife (2016)
These traits are influenced by some of the same genes and variants as this one
Body Mass Index: A measure of body weight relative to height, used as a proxy for overall adiposity.
Content updated August 2026.
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