Obesity: Key Factor for Cardiometabolic Risk.
Diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, musculoskeletal diseases, mental health problems and even certain cancers are more common among obese patients. According to World Health Organization (WHO), obesity is one of the ten responsible for more than a third of deaths, being the second cause of premature avoidable mortality after smoke.
Another issue to examine is anthropometric indices, such as waist circumference, which may predict seven cardiovascular risk factors frequently associated to obesity: hypertension, hypertriglyceridemia, LDL-c, non-HDL-c, low-HDL-c, glycaemia basal or their associations.
In accordance with recent findings in the Framingham study, the measurement of visceral and subcutaneous abdominal fat, either by volumetric method or by fatty area in tomographic cut at different levels (particularly at L3-L4), is directly related to the next metabolic risk factors: fasting blood glucose, triglycerides, HDL-c and systolic blood pressure.
Accordingly, there has been a requirement to find biological markers in the daily clinical practice to associate anthropometric and metabolic alterations with the prevalent syndrome metabolic in obese patients. Peculiarly, the combination of increased waist circumference and high triglyceride concentration may determinate a subgroup with high risk of developing MS. According to hypertriglyceridemia waist researches in different populations, this phenotypic alteration is
strongly linked to the risk of diabetes, probably as a consequence of its association with obesity.
Apart from the increased morbidity and mortality associated with overweight and obesity, there is evidence in the increased cardiovascular risk of metabolic origin associated to a visceral adiposity. In fact, visceral adipose tissue correlates strikingly with proatherogenic, prodiabetrogenic, prothrombogenic, and proinflammatory phenomena. Although, waist circumference has
demonstrated to be a useful marker for assessing obesity beyond the BMI, abdominal fat accumulation may be the result of an increase in visceral or subcutaneous adipose tissue.
Obes Res Open J. 2017; 4(2): e10-e12. doi: 10.17140/OROJ-4-e012
