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The shorter you are, the higher your risk of coronary heart disease, it has been claimed.

Researchers say every 2.5 inches change in your height affected your risk of coronary heart disease by 13.5%, the Daily Mail reports.

For example, compared to a 5ft 6inch tall person, a 5 foot tall person on average has a 32% higher risk of coronary heart disease because of their relatively shorter stature.

The research, led by Professor Sir Nilesh Samani, British Heart Foundation Professor of Cardiology at the University of Leicester, is published online in the New England Journal of Medicine.

'For more than 60 years it has been known that there is an inverse relationship between height and risk of coronary heart disease,' Professor Samani said.

'It is not clear whether this relationship is due to confounding factors such as poor socioeconomic environment, or nutrition, during childhood that on the one hand determine achieved height and on the other the risk of coronary heart disease, or whether it represents a primary relationship between shorter height and more coronary heart disease.'

Professor Samani, who is also Head of the Department of Cardiovascular Sciences at the University of Leicester and a Consultant Cardiologist at Leicester's Hospitals, added: 'Height has a strong genetic determination and in the last few years a large number of genetic variants have been identified in our DNA that determines one's height.

'The beauty about DNA is that it cannot be modified by one's lifestyle or socio-economic conditions.

'Therefore if shorter height is directly connected with increased risk of coronary heart disease one would expect that these variants would also be associated with coronary heart disease and this is precisely what we found.

'While we know about many lifestyle factors such as smoking that affect risk of coronary heart disease, our findings underscore the fact that the causes of this common disease are very complex and other things that we understand much more poorly have a significant impact.

'While our findings do not have any immediate clinical implications, better and fuller understanding of the biological mechanisms that underlie the relationship between shorter height and higher risk of coronary heart disease may open up new ways for its prevention and treatment.'

Professor Jeremy Pearson, Associate Medical Director at the BHF, which part-funded the study, said: 'Further exploration of these genes may suggest new ways to reduce the risk of heart and circulatory disease.'