Waist Circumference in recently diagnosed type 2 diabetics

ABSTRACT

Body mass index [BMI] is often used to reflect total body fat amount [general obesity] whereas waist circumference [WC], waist-to-hip ratio or waist-to height ratio is used as a surrogate of body fat centralization [central obesity]. The clustering of cardiovascular risk factors in association with disturbance of glucose and lipid metabolism is referred to as metabolic syndrome. Men and women who have waist circumference > 94cm and 80 cm respectively, are considered to be at increased risk for cardio metabolic disease.The relation between waist circumference and clinical outcome is consistently strong for diabetes risk, and waist circumference is a stronger predictor of diabetes than BMI. Our study is the first study to measure waist circumference in newly diagnosed Egyptian diabetic patients. We found that, 56% of newly diagnosed Egyptians diabetic patients have metabolic syndrome. At the same time we found a statistically significant difference as regard metabolic syndrome components between low waist and high waist groups but the difference was statistically insignificant when we compared low BMI with high BMI groups in newly diagnosed diabetics. This means that waist circumference is a simple tool to predict diabetes and metabolic syndrome better than other measures: