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Less than three metabolic risk factors found in majority of patients with abdominal obesity
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While increasing waist girth was found to be associated with a rise in all metabolic risk factors in black, white and Hispanic men and women, the majority of the participants studied did not have elevated risk factors even when obese, according to the results of a study that examined the association between waist girth, ethnicity and gender with susceptibility for metabolic risk, published in Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders.
“This finding points to the need to focus largely on subjects with metabolic risk factors when implementing therapeutic interventions,” Scott M. Grundy, MD, PhD, director of the Center for Human Nutrition, Chairman of the Department of Clinical Nutrition, and director of the Clinical and Translational Research Center at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and colleagues wrote.
Researchers examined data on 1,671 women and 1,339 men enrolled in the Dallas Heart Study. Among women, 50.7% were black, and 46.5% of men were black. Each participant was put into one of three waist girth categories: low, intermediate and high.
The researchers found that the prevalence of all metabolic risk factors rose with each waist girth category, however, even among those with high waist girth, less than 50% had three or more metabolic risk factors.
Some differences among ethnic groups were also noted. Compared to white men, Hispanic men had higher prevalence of elevated triglyceride. Black men had lower prevalence of elevated triglyceride, compared to white men. Black men were less likely to have low high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) compared to the other groups, and more likely to have elevated blood pressure. Black and Hispanic men had higher prevalence of elevated glucose compared to white men. These differences were noted in women, but were less pronounced.
“An important observation in the current study was that among those with high waist girth, or what is called abdominal obesity in the United States, only about one-half or less had categorical metabolic risk factors,” the researchers wrote. “Conversely, in all ethnic groups, a sizable portion with high waist girths were resistant to the development of risk factors. Moreover, less than a third of men and less than a fifth of women with high waist girths had three or four metabolic risk factors. These findings do not minimize the impact of abdominal obesity on metabolic risk factors for the population as a whole, but they do show the importance of individual variability in susceptibility for their development.”
Disclosures: The authors do not have any disclosures in relation to the content of this study.
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