Anthropometrics in Predicting Cardiovascular Disease Risk: Our Research Work Mathematically Demonstrates that Cardiovascular Sciences Were Always Confused for a Long Time

Abstract

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDS) mainly heart disease and stroke are the leading causes of death globaly. Obesity is a major risk factor for myocardial infarction (MI) and CVD. However, how to measure CVD risk with simple baseline anthropometric characteristics? Besides, association of anthropometrics and CVD may present effects of bias, and in evaluating risk, the lack of balance between simple measurements will be particularly prone to the generation of false-positive results. The purpose of this paper is to provide the key concepts for demonstrating association biases for metrics taken from multiple large-scale studies worldwide. Epidemiologically, waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) is a confounding variable with respect to waist circumference (WC) and waist-to-height ratio (WHtR). This is due to different imbalances between hip circumference (HC)-WC and HC-height, respectively, occurring in a protective overestimation for HC concerning WC and height. Similarly, WC may be a confounding variable with respect to WHtR due to an imbalance in WC-height: This occurs if, and only if, the mean WC > height/2 (WHtR risk cut-off >0.5). This, therefore, overestimates risk in tallest people and lead to underestimations in the shortest people. Anthropometrically, only WHtR is the only measure that is directly associated to a relative risk volume and yields no biases, and it should therefore be the metric used to compare the anthropometrically-measured causal risk.