Seasonal variations of the prevalence of metabolic syndrome and its markers using big-data of health check-ups.

Background: It is crucial to understand the seasonal variation of Metabolic Syndrome (MetS) for the detection and management of MetS. Previous studies have demonstrated the seasonal variations in MetS prevalence and its markers, but their methods are not robust. To clarify the concrete seasonal variations in the MetS prevalence and its markers, we utilized a powerful method called Seasonal Trend Decomposition Procedure based on LOESS (STL) and a big dataset of health checkups.

Methods: A total of 1,819,214 records of health checkups (759,839 records for men and 1,059,375 records for women) between April 2012 and December 2017 were included in this study. We examined the seasonal variations in the MetS prevalence and its markers using 5 years and 9 months health checkup data and STL analysis. MetS markers consisted of waist circumference (WC), systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), triglycerides (TG), high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), fasting plasma glucose (FPG).

Results: We found that the MetS prevalence was high in winter and somewhat high in August. Among men, MetS prevalence was 2.64 ± 0.42 (mean ± SD) % higher in the highest month (January) than in the lowest month (June). Among women, MetS prevalence was 0.53 ± 0.24% higher in the highest month (January) than in the lowest month (June). Additionally, SBP, DBP, and HDL-C exhibited simple variations, being higher in winter and lower in summer, while WC, TG, and FPG displayed more complex variations.

Conclusions: This finding, complex seasonal variations of MetS prevalence, WC, TG, and FPG, could not be derived from previous studies using just the mean values in spring, summer, autumn and winter or the cosinor analysis. More attention should be paid to factors affecting seasonal variations of central obesity, dyslipidemia and insulin resistance.