Now Your Height Can Predict Health Risks You May Suffer in Future

Now Your Height Can Predict Health Risks You May Suffer in Future

Scientists say they have developed a new DNA tool that uses machine learning to accurately predict people's height and assess their risk for serious illnesses such as heart disease and cancer.

The tool, or algorithm, builds predictors for human traits such as height, bone density and even the level of education a person might achieve, purely based on one's genome, according to the research published in the journal Genetics.

"While we have validated this tool for these three outcomes, we can now apply this method to predict other complex traits related to health risks such as heart disease, diabetes and breast cancer," said Stephen Hsu from Michigan State University (MSU) in the US.


The research analysed the complete genetic makeup of nearly 500,000 adults in the UK using machine learning, where a computer learns from data.

The computer accurately predicted everyone's height within roughly an inch.






"The computer learns from each person and ultimately produces a predictor that can determine how tall they are from their genome alone," Hsu said.


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