Endocrine Abstracts

Objective: To determine risk factor pattern of the metabolic syndrome (MetS) and its association with serum nitric oxide metabolites (NO_x) in children and adolescents.

Subjects and methods: A cross-sectional study was carried out in 409 male and 442 female children and adolescents aged 4 to 19 years. The ethical committee of our institute approved the study. The MetS was defined according to modified ATPIII criteria and factor analysis was used to examine the risk factor pattern of the MetS in entire population and within strata of sex, MetS, and obesity.

Results: The prevalence of MetS was 10.8 and 10.0% in males and females respectively. Subjects with MetS had higher age-and-sex adjusted NO_x compared to those without MetS (25.2 vs 27.9, P=0.04). Age-and-sex-adjusted odds ratio of having MetS was significantly higher in the upper quartile of NO_x compared to the lower quartile (2.2, 95% CI: 1.1–4.7, P=0.029). In the entire study population, three factors were identified including blood pressure/obesity, lipid/obesity, and glucose/NO_x; factors that explain 59.9% of the total variance in the data. After stratifying analyses for sex, again three factors were retained in both genders however, NO_x was loaded in two factors in males. In subjects without MetS and those who had normal weight, NOx constituted a separate factor while in subjects with MetS and those who were overweight or obese, it loaded with FPG and/or BMI.

Conclusions: Serum NO_x was associated with MetS in children and adolescents; in addition, serum NO_x was loaded with other MetS components especially fasting glucose in the cluster analysis of metabolic risk factors and it may have a unifying role in clustering of MetS components, at least in male subjects.