Abstract
Fat-to-muscle ratio has been proposed as an alternative approach for assessing body fat. The objective of this study was to explore fat-to-muscle ratio thresholds in metabolic syndrome (MetS) diagnosis; it was hypothesised that the fat-to-muscle ratio is a good predictive indicator of MetS in a large population of young Colombian adults. For this purpose, a cross-sectional study was conducted on 1416 subjects (66.6% female), aged from 18.1 to 25.1. As part of the study, measurements of the subjects’ anthropometric indicators, serum lipid indices, blood pressure, and fasting plasma glucose were taken. Body composition was measured through bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA). A new variable (ratio of fat mass to muscle mass, in kg) was calculated. Following the International Diabetes Federation (IDF) definition, MetS includes three or more metabolic abnormalities. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and logistic regression determined the discriminatory ability of the fat-to-muscle ratio to predict MetS. According to the IDF, the best fat-to-muscle ratio cut-off point for detecting MetS in men was 0.225 kg, with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.83, sensitivity of 80%, and specificity of 70%. For women, the fat-to-muscle ratio cut-off point was 0.495 kg, the AUC was 0.88, and the sensitivity and specificity were 82% and 80%, respectively. In conclusion, our results showed that the fat-to-muscle ratio cut-off points from ROC analyses demonstrate good discriminatory power for detecting MetS in young Colombian adults.
Highlights
Metabolic syndrome (MetS) is a cluster of conditions—raised blood pressure, abnormal cholesterol or triglyceride levels, high blood glucose, and excess body fat around the waist—that occur together, increasing the incidence of type 2 diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular diseases (CVD), and kidney diseases, as well as a greater risk of cardiovascular disease mortality and all-cause mortality [1,2].According to the 2016-Pan American Health Organisation and Noncommunicable DiseasePrevention and Control, metabolic syndrome (MetS) has become a serious public health problem [3]
As adipose tissue plays a central role in MetS, various researchers have begun to explore the predictive ability of anthropometric indicators such as waist circumference (WC), body fat percentage (BF%), body adiposity index, body mass index (BMI), waist-to-height ratio, and fat mass index (FMI) as a screening tool for MetS [10,11]
Our findings showed that the fat-to-muscle ratio has a high discriminatory power for detecting MetS in young Colombian adults, supporting the hypothesis that it is a useful indicator for identifying young people at a high risk of MetS
Summary
Metabolic syndrome (MetS) is a cluster of conditions—raised blood pressure, abnormal cholesterol or triglyceride levels, high blood glucose, and excess body fat around the waist—that occur together, increasing the incidence of type 2 diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular diseases (CVD), and kidney diseases, as well as a greater risk of cardiovascular disease mortality and all-cause mortality [1,2].According to the 2016-Pan American Health Organisation and Noncommunicable DiseasePrevention and Control, MetS has become a serious public health problem [3]. Reported a prevalence of 41% among adults aged 25–64 from Medellin and surrounding municipalities in the Andean Colombian region, and Miranda et al [6] conducted a cross-sectional study in Armenia, Colombia, of males with a mean age of 45.9 and reported a similar MetS prevalence of 49%, using the definition of the US National Cholesterol Education Programme–Adult Treatment Panel III [7] For this reason, cardiovascular risk factor measurements are important, even at an early age, for detecting risk profiles in time for intervention [5,8,9]. Anthropometric indicators consider only the effect of fat on metabolism, ignoring skeletal muscle, another relevant tissue
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