Height may point to a biological basis for pedophilia, according to new research released by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). The study found that pedophilic males were shorter on average than males without a sexual attraction to children.

Your height in adult life significantly affects your quality of life, with short people reporting worse physical and mental health than people of normal height. This large, peer reviewed study, which appears in Clinical Endocrinology, shows that adult height is linked to how good a person thinks their health is. Short people judge their state of health to be significantly lower than their normal height peers do.

For the first time, scientists have identified one of the many genes which commonly influence our height. The work, which was partly funded by the EU, is published online by the journal Nature Genetics.

Whilst we all know that tall parents are more likely to have tall children, scientists have been unable to identify any common genes that make people taller than others. Now, however, scientists have identified the first gene, known as HMGA2, a common variant of which directly influences height.

It became clear nearly a century ago that many genes likely influence how tall a person grows, though little progress, if any, has followed in defining the myriad genes. Now an international research team brings light to this age-old question by pinpointing a genetic variant associated with human height — the first consistent genetic link to be reported.