Being short may increase death risk in ICU patients, reveals a new study.

The study showed that the average-height man's odds of dying are just over 22 percent, but that death risk increases by around 30 percent for the very shortest.
In addition, women see their death rates jump from 17.1 to 24.1 percent if they are shorter, as per the study published in the journal Intensive Care Medicine.
The reason shorter people may be at a higher risk of death could be because a lot of intensive care equipment is set up for average-sized male patients.
It could be that shorter people are given too large a dose of medication, more than required, such as sedatives resulting in sleepiness, which ultimately causes them to stop breathing.
In addition, wrong-sized breathing tube could cause damage to the vocal cords in shorter people, Daily Mail reported.
Advertisement
"There is not a single thing which could explain this increase in mortality in shorter people admitted to intensive care units," said Hannah Wunsch, a researcher from the Sunnybrook Hospital in Canada.
Advertisement
"We know doctors do not always measure people's heights, but equipment settings should often take this into account. The small differences relevant to how tall someone is can add up," noted Wunsch.
For the study, researchers included 400,000 patients at 210 intensive care units.
Source-IANS