Nutritional factors are known to have a considerable role in infancy whereas sex steroids and other hormones strongly regulate height growth in adolescence [12],[13]. This indicates that different biological pathways are involved in the augmentation of height at different stages of growth [10],[14]. We therefore expect that different patterns of genetic variation are associated with regulation of height growth at different stages, specifically at the two stages of fast growth: infancy and puberty. This hypothesis has been introduced before [15] but it has not yet been explored in population based genetic association studies.
