Endocrine Abstracts

Obesity is one of the leading causes of elevated cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality and morbidity. Several indicators of abdominal obesity such as body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference (WC) are available. BMI and WC have limitations in stratifying cardio-metabolic risks. Another obesity measure, A Body Shape Index (ABSI), has been introduced but its applicability remains limited. To address this, the z-score of the log-transformed ABSI (LBSIZ) was recently developed. This study aimed to examine the ability of LBSIZ, compared to that of WC and BMI, to predict CVD risk. The study included participants who were recruited from the Korean Genome and Epidemiology Study, a population-based cohort study and followed for 10 years. A total of 8485 participants were analysed. The area under the curve was 0.633 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.611-0.655) for LBSIZ, 0.604 (95% CI: 0.580-0.627) for WC, and 0.538 (95% CI: 0.514-0.562) for BMI. In multivariate Cox regression analysis, BMI and WC showed the lowest risk for CVD events in 2^nd decile and an overall J-shaped relationship with their deciles (p-trend: <0.001 WC vs 0.03 BMI). However, LBSIZ showed the lowest risk for CVD events in the 1^st decile and a linear relationship across its deciles (p-trend of <0.001). The results of this study indicate that participants with high level of LBSIZ have significantly higher rate of CVD events than those with low level and LBSIZ is more strongly associated with CVD risk than BMI and WC in general population.