You’re a Japanese male and you have some crazy notion about wanting to be taller.

Better think again.

A Honolulu-based research study published this week found a connection between short height and longer life in men of Japanese ancestry.

Researchers at the Kuakini Medical Center, the University of Hawaii and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs worked on the study published Wednesday in PLOS ONE, a peer-reviewed medical journal.

The researchers found that shorter men were more likely to have a protective form of the longevity gene, FOXO3, which leads to smaller body size during early development and a longer life span. Shorter men were also more likely to have lower blood insulin levels and less cancer.

Bradley Willcox, one of 11 study investigators and a professor in UH’s John A. Burns School of Medicine’s Department of Geriatric Medicine, said previous studies linking height to longevity have been highly controversial because height is often tied to socioeconomic status, with shorter people tending to have poor nutritional habits.

But this study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and other sources, was able to draw on the medical data collected from the Kuakini Honolulu-Asia Aging Study and the Kuakini Honolulu Heart Program, an ongoing study of thousands of Japanese-American men over a span of nearly 50 years, he noted.

"When your human population is homogenous, the real biology starts to come through," Willcox said.

The researchers split the men into two groups — those who were 5 feet 2 inches and shorter, and those 5 feet 4 inches and taller. After examining all of their medical and demographic data, it turns out the shorter group lived longer.

All of the men, born between the years 1900 and 1919, ranged in height from 5 to 6 feet.

"The taller you got, the shorter you lived," he said.

Willcox said the study shows for the first time that human body size is linked to the FOXO3 longevity gene. That had already been established in other species — mice, roundworms, flies and even yeast — which have the same or a slightly different version of the gene.

Willcox said tall men of Japanese ancestry shouldn’t fret too much about the study’s findings. He said the average height of the study group was 5 feet 3 inches, and average heights have increased by at least four inches over the last 100 years.

In addition, it doesn’t necessarily matter how tall you are, he said, because you can still live a healthy lifestyle to offset having a typical FOXO3 genotype rather than the special longevity-enhancing form of the FOXO3 gene.

The researchers suggest that more study is needed to verify the findings and determine whether they can be generalized to other ethnic groups or populations.

The Kuakini Honolulu Heart Program started in 1965 with 8,006 American men of Japanese ancestry. The lifestyles and health conditions of these men were closely followed and studied by the researchers through the years. All men were living on Oahu in 1965.

Officials said Kuakini is the only research program that maintains a comprehensive, ongoing database of demographic, lifestyle and medical information as well as biological specimens collected, from such a large group of aging men.

"One of the reasons why Honolulu is perfect for this kind of study is that we have the longest-lived state in the country, combined with a population that has remained, for the most part, in Hawaii. This has helped us maintain one of the longest-running, largest studies of aging men in the world," Willcox said.

Hawaii leads the country in longevity with an average of 81.5 years, according to national health statistics.

Some 1,200 men from the Kuakini study lived into their 90s and 100s, and about 250 of those men are still alive today. Those alive today range in age from 95 to 106.

And they’re pretty much all short, Willcox said.