Response: The Relationship of Body Composition and Coronary Artery Calcification in Apparently Healthy Korean Adults (Endocrinol Metab 2013;28:33-40, Jung-Hee Yu et al.)

Abstract

We want to thank the editors of Endocrinology and Metabolism for giving us the opportunity to publish our work in Endocrinology and Metabolism and also for the insightful comments on our paper. There have been a few previous studies performed on the association between body composition and coronary artery calcification in other ethnic groups [1-3], however, as the editors commented, our work is valuable in that this was the first study of its kind performed in apparently healthy Korean adults. Given that more and more interest has been shown on the differential effects of various proportions of lean mass and fat mass on metabolism, our study is meaningful in that we confirmed the importance of visceral fat, not only in development of insulin resistance, but also in subclinical atherosclerosis in the Korean population. Regarding the comments from Prof. Choi, we performed logistic regression analyses with coronary artery calcification as the dependent variable, after adjusting for confounding factors including the lean and fat mass separately for men and women. However, when logistic regression analyses were performed separately for the different genders, only age showed a significant correlation with coronary artery calcification, after adjusting for all the confounding variables in either gender. We do not know why the analyses separated by gender showed different results from the analyses of the total population; however, the decreased number of patients in the separate study populations could have weakened the significance of the correlation that had been observed in the analyses of the whole study population. In addition, failure to consider the subjects' medical history, especially the medication use, could have affected the confounding variables included in the model, since the proportion of medication use could have been different in each gender. As Prof. Choi referred, the absence of subjects' personal medication and disease history, which is the weakest point of this study, could have affected the main results.