Rare gene variants can change your height by up to 7 centimetres

Nearly 30 rare gene variants that decrease people’s height by up to 7 centimetres, or raise it by up to 5 cm, have been discovered by analysing the genomes of more than 300,000 individuals.

“The variants I found, they’re very rare, so less than 1 per cent of individuals carry them, but their effects are very large,” says Gareth Hawkes at the University of Exeter Medical School in the UK.

Height is largely genetically determined,…