Mediciones de obesidad abdominal como predictores de riesgo metabólico en escolares y adolescentes, Colombia 2018.

Background: obesity is related to chronic non-communicable diseases in children and adolescents. Obesity is a public health problem that leads to greater morbidity and mortality in adulthood. The risk of suffering complications associated with excess body fat and related factors to lipid and carbohydrate metabolism is known as metabolic risk. Objective: To determine the capacity of the waist-to-height index and the waist circumference to detect the presence of metabolic risk factors compared with the body mass index in a school population from Cundinamarca, Colombia. Methods: a descriptive cross-sectional study in a population aged 6 to 17 years. Anthropometric and biochemical measurements were performed, and total and abdominal obesity were defined. The variables were compared with the Mann-Whitney U test and the statistics. Sensitivity, specificity, and area under the curve analyzes were performed. Results: 35% presented hypercholesterolemia, 32% hypertriglyceridemia and 1.6% hyperglycemia. 12% had a waist-height index equal to or greater than 0.5, while 24% had abdominal obesity due to waist circumference. According to the area under the curve, the body mass index, the waist circumference, and the waist-height index had a low discriminative capacity. For hypercholesterolemia, the highest value was for the waist-height index (0.55). For hypertriglyceridemia, the waist circumference (0.61). Conclusions: The results showed that the waist height index and waist circumference are better predictors of metabolic risk than the body mass index. Also, they constituted simple measures that do not need to be adjusted for sex, age and compared with reference tables.