Renal involvement is related to body height in newly diagnosed diabetic women aged 40 years or over.

We scrutinized the relation between body height and renal involvement in a large population-based sample of newly diagnosed diabetic patients aged 40 years or over. The urinary albumin concentration (UAC) was measured in freshly voided morning urine in 1,284 newly diagnosed diabetic patients. The course of insulin treatment showed that at least 97.6% of the patients could be regarded as Type 2 diabetic. Linear regression analyses were done with log UAC as dependent variable, and height, age, HbA1c, smoking habits, education, occupation, body weight and systolic blood pressure as independent variables. Median age was 65.3 years. In bivariate analyses UAC increased with decreasing height for women (R (S) =- 0.090, p =0.028), but not for men (R (S) =- 0.049, p =0.20). After backwards elimination in the regression models, height remained in the model for women only (p =0.041). Our finding of a relationship between short stature and renal involvement in Type 2 diabetic female patients adds to existing evidence from studies with non-diabetic and Type 1 diabetic subjects.