Surrogate and direct measures of adiposity associated with risk of metabolic syndrome in rural Chinese women
Document Actions
While body mass index (BMI) is correlated with direct measures of total and central obesity, it is also influenced by lean (mostly skeletal muscle) body mass and bone mass. The study was based on the hypothesis that direct measures of adiposity might help develop further insight into the link between obesity and metabolic syndrome, thus allowing a more accurate identification of subjects at high risk for developing the disease. The study including 3734 lean Chinese rural female twins was designed to examine how surrogate and direct measures of adiposity were associated with metabolic syndrome risk. To this end, percent body fat (%BF) and proportion of trunk fat to total BF (%TF) were assessed by DEXA, the associations of adiposity measures with metabolic syndrome and its components were examined, and the concordance of adiposity measures and metabolic syndrome abnormalities were compared between monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twin pairs. The prevalence of metabolic syndrome increased with BMI≥23 kg/m2, BF≥32%, waist circumference (WC) ≥80 cm, and TF≥50%, and was <3% below these thresholds. Among women with normal BMI and WC, high %TF was associated with a 1.3-2.0-fold elevated risk of metabolic syndrome components whereas women with high BMI but normal WC and %TF had no significantly increased risk of either metabolic syndrome or its components, except for hypertension. Compared with DZ twins, MZ twins exhibited higher concordance for metabolic syndrome and its components. Thus, in these Chinese rural women, BMI≥23 kg/m2 and WC≥80 cm were associated with a markedly increased risk of metabolic syndrome, which was further enhanced by elevated %TF.
Abstract
