Association of obesity anthropometric indices with hypertension, diabetes mellitus and hypertriglyceridemia in apparently healthy adult Nigerian population

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.

The population distribution of the sagittal abdominal diameter (SAD) and SAD/height ratio among Finnish adults

Sagittal abdominal diameter (SAD; 'abdominal height' measured in supine position) may improve upon conventional anthropometry for predicting incident cardiometabolic diseases. However, the SAD is used infrequently by practitioners and epidemiologists. A representative survey of Finnish adults in 2000-2001 collected body measurements including SAD (by sliding-beam calliper) using standardized protocols. Sampled non-pregnant adults (ages 30+ years; 79% participation) provided 6123 SAD measurements from 80 health centre districts. Through stratified, complex survey design, these data represented 2.86 million adults at ages 30+ years. SAD ranged from 13.5 to 38.0 cm, with a population mean (standard error) of 21.7 (0.05) cm and median (interquartile range) of 21.0 (19.1-23.4). Median SAD was higher at ages 50+ years compared with ages 30-49 both for men (22.4 [20.5-24.6] vs. 20.8 [19.3-22.7]) and women (21.7 [19.6-23.9] vs. 19.4 [17.8-21.4]). The SAD/height ratio was similar (0.118) for both sexes at 30-39 years, rising more steeply with age for women than men. Attaining only a basic education, compared with a high level, was associated with increased mean (95% confidence interval) SADs for men (22.6 [22.3-22.8] vs. 22.0 [21.7-22.2]) and women (21.8 [21.5-22.0] vs. 20.6 [20.4-20.8]). Finland's early experience with nationally representative SAD measurements provides normative reference values and physiological insights useful for investigations of cardiometabolic risk.