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Health Check: Height and Cancer

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07/08/2013

Height and Cancer

BBC World Service - Health Check, Height and Cancer

What is the link between how tall someone is and the risk of getting cancer?

What is the link between how tall someone is and the risk of getting cancer? Should German mothers continue to give birth anonymously? Plus, hikikomori emails from listeners.

According to the results of a vast American study examining the link between height and cancer risk, shorter women are less likely than taller women to develop 19 different sorts of cancer. The research looked at almost 21,000 women and has just been published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology. Dr Geoffrey Kabat, a cancer epidemiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, is the lead author.

Anonymous Birth in Germany
Two babies were recently abandoned in a Dusseldorf cemetery in Germany. Up to 35 babies are killed or abandoned each year, and the numbers are not going down, even though there are 100 baby hatches across Germany where parents can leave their unwanted newborns. Mothers can also give birth anonymously in hospital and leave their babies there. But a recent report concluded that the practice contravened children's basic rights and that it put immense physical and mental stress on mother and baby. In response, the German government now has plans to phase out anonymous birth. The BBC’s Abby d'Arcy reports from Berlin.

Hikikomori
Hikikomori is a condition where young people withdraw from life and in Japan there are thought to be as many as a million cases of it. It is also recognised as a phenomenon in other countries including South Korea, Taiwan and Italy. In response to a BBC article on Hikikomori, hundreds of people from nearly 30 countries wrote in about their experiences of this disorder. Health Check shares a selection of them.

Picture credit: BBC. A woman looking out to the River Ore and Chantry Marshes in Orford, Suffolk

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