NEW YORK -- People who have relatively short thighs appear to have an increased risk of developing diabetes or a condition that often precedes the disease compared to those with longer gams, researchers said Friday.

But study author Dr. Keiko Asao cautioned that the study does not mean that thigh length in any way causes diabetes.

Asao explained that a third factor, such as the environment in the womb or nutrition in childhood, likely influences both leg length and future diabetes risk.

The precise identity of that third factor remains unclear, she added.

"We are struggling with how to explain that," said Asao, who is at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

People who have relatively short thighs are not doomed to develop diabetes, Asao said. These results are preliminary, she said, and diabetes is a "multifactorial disease" that results from many different causes.

Those with relatively short thighs would not harm themselves if they chose to spend extra energy trying to ward off diabetes, Asao noted. But she recommended people who are concerned about diabetes pay more attention to well-established risk factors, such as obesity.

The study focused on type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease, and not type 1 diabetes, which often develops in children or young adults and requires daily insulin injections for survival. Type 2 diabetes more commonly occurs in adults and can sometimes be controlled with diet and exercise.

Asao and her colleagues presented their findings at the American Heart Association's 43rd Annual Conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention in Miami.

To obtain their findings, Asao and her team reviewed information about 8,738 adults between the ages of 40 and 74 collected during national surveys conducted by the U.S. government.

The authors found that the shorter people's thighs, the greater their risk of having diabetes or insulin resistance, a condition marked by a loss of sensitivity to this key blood-sugar-regulating hormone that often precedes diabetes. After taking into account other risk factors, the researchers found the link remained true for white and Mexican-American women, but not blacks or men.

Previous research has suggested that shorter people may be at an overall higher risk of diabetes, Asao noted, but added that in the current study, height was not linked to diabetes risk. She suggested that differences in the people included in the two studies may explain the diverging results.

She noted that previous research has also linked height to other chronic diseases, with one study suggesting that taller people have an elevated risk of high blood pressure. The relationship between height and blood pressure could also stem from early growth factors that resemble those that may explain the link between thigh length and diabetes risk, she said. Whether the length of other body appendages could also be linked to diabetes risk remains unknown, Asao added. (Reuters)