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BACKGROUND: Hypertension, hyperglycemia and hypertriglyceridemia are chronic conditions associated with cardiometabolic diseases. Certain anthropometric indices are known to predict them. AIM: To investigate the association of anthropometric indices with these chronic diseases and which anthropometric index predicts them best. METHODS: In this study, 221 apparently healthy individuals who never received treatments for cardiovascular disease (CVD), diabetes or other chronic diseases participated. The age of the participants ranged from 20-75 years with mean age of 36.9 ± 11.4 years. The risk factors of these diseases namely systolic blood pressures (SBP) and diastolic blood pressures (DBP), fasting blood glucose (FBG) and triglycerides (TG) were determined for all the participants using standard clinical procedures. The obesity anthropometric indices, waist circumference, waist-to-height ratio, waist-to-hip ratio and body mass index as well as abdominal height (AH) and body surface index were determined. The association between each of them with the risk factors were determined by the Pearson correlation method. RESULTS: From the results, it was found that AH showed superiority over the rest for SBP (r = 0.301, P < 0.01), DBP (r = 0.370, P < 0.01), FBG (r = 0.297, P < 0.01) and TG (r = 0.380, P < 0.01). Using the receiver operating characteristic curves, cut-off values of AH for SBP, DBP, FBG and TG were determined to be 24.75 cm, 24.75 cm, 25.25 cm and 24.75 cm respectively. CONCLUSION: The indices of anthropometry used in this study correlated significantly with the studied CVD risk factors, with AH emerging as the most predictive.
RESUMO
OBJECTIVE: Overweight/obesity has predicted cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk for long with its standard measure of body mass index (BMI), which later was found to mis-classify risk oftentimes. This is because it does not differentiate between fat and whole body mass. The finding that fat especially visceral fat was more culpable shifted attention to ectopic fat as a more precise measure of CVD risk. Peri-renal fat (PRF) is one such ectopic foci, which is hardly used despite the relative ease of assessment. We assessed PRF to correlate it with carotid intima media thickness (CIMT) to see if there was any significance in order to obviate need for heavy equipment in CVD risk assessment. METHODS: This is secondary analysis of data generated in the course of studying sub-clinical atherosclerosis in apparently normal individuals. Subjects underwent routine anthropometry to determine BMI. They then underwent abdominal ultrasound studies wherein PRF was measured as the size of the echogenic strip between the posterior part of the liver and the right kidney. The CIMT was measured using the same equipment but a different transducer, as the distance between the intima and medial layers of the right common carotid artery 1 cm proximal to the carotid bulb. RESULTS: The 221 subjects (82 M, 139 F) had mean ages of 37.01±10.97 and 36.86±11.62 years respectively. PRF correlated significantly with CIMT, age and all anthropometric measures. A PRF level of 0.26 cm turned out to be a significant value that determined presence of sub-clinical atherosclerosis deriving from the receiver operating characteristic curve analysis. CONCLUSION: PRF has shown to be correlated significantly with indices that predict atherosclerosis. Being an ectopic fat focus, its local and systemic effects on the kidney increase systemic vascular resistance and CVD. Since it can easily be measured on abdominal ultrasound, a test readily available and requiring lower level skills it should be used to advantage. Levels above 0.26 cm should prompt initiation of curative or preventive action to control CVD in the population.