Document Reviewers: Luis Alcocer (Mexico), Christina Antza (Greece), Mustafa Arici (Turkey), Eduardo Barbosa (Brazil), Adel Berbari (Lebanon), Luís Bronze (Portugal), John Chalmers (Australia), Tine De Backer (Belgium), Alejandro de la Sierra (Spain), Kyriakos Dimitriadis (Greece), Dorota Drozdz (Poland), Béatrice Duly-Bouhanick (France), Brent M. Egan (USA), Serap Erdine (Turkey), Claudio Ferri (Italy), Slavomira Filipova (Slovak Republic), Anthony Heagerty (UK), Michael Hecht Olsen (Denmark), Dagmara Hering (Poland), Sang Hyun Ihm (South Korea), Uday Jadhav (India), Manolis Kallistratos (Greece), Kazuomi Kario (Japan), Vasilios Kotsis (Greece), Adi Leiba (Israel), Patricio López-Jaramillo (Colombia), Hans-Peter Marti (Norway), Terry McCormack (UK), Paolo Mulatero (Italy), Dike B. Ojji (Nigeria), Sungha Park (South Korea), Priit Pauklin (Estonia), Sabine Perl (Austria), Arman Postadzhian (Bulgaria), Aleksander Prejbisz (Poland), Venkata Ram (India), Ramiro Sanchez (Argentina), Markus Schlaich (Australia), Alta Schutte (Australia), Cristina Sierra (Spain), Sekib Sokolovic (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Jonas Spaak (Sweden), Dimitrios Terentes-Printzios (Greece), Bruno Trimarco (Italy), Thomas Unger (The Netherlands), Bert-Jan van den Born (The Netherlands), Anna Vachulova (Slovak Republic), Agostino Virdis (Italy), Jiguang Wang (China), Ulrich Wenzel (Germany), Paul Whelton (USA), Jiri Widimsky (Czech Republic), Jacek Wolf (Poland), Grégoire Wuerzner (Switzerland), Eugene Yang (USA), Yuqing Zhang (China).

Metabolic syndrome (MetS) remains a controversial entity. Specific clusters of MetS components - rather than MetS per se’- were associated with accelerated arterial ageing and with CV events. To investigate whether the distribution of the “risky” clusters of MetS components differed cross-culturally, we studied 34,821 subjects from 12 cohorts from 10 European countries and 1 from US participants in the MARE (Metabolic syndrome and Arteries REsearch) Consortium. In accordance with the ATP III criteria, MetS was defined as an alteration ≥3 of the following 5 components: elevated glucose (G): fasting glucose ≥110 mg/dl; low HDL cholesterol (H): <40 mg/dl for M or < 50 mg/dl for W; high triglycerides (T) ≥150 mg/dl; elevated BP (B): ≥130/≥85 mmHg; abdominal obesity (W): waist circumference > 102 cm for M or >88 cm for W. MetS had a 24.3% prevalence (8468 subjects) (23.9% in men vs 24.6% in women, p<0.001) with an age-associated increase in its prevalence in all the cohorts. The age-adjusted prevalence of the clusters of MetS components previously associated with greater arterial and CV burden differed across countries (p< 0.0001) and in men and women (gender effect p<0.0001). In details, the cluster T-B-W was observed in 12% of the subjects with MetS, but was far more common in the cohorts from UK (32.3%), Sardinia in Italy (19.6%), and Germany (18.5%) and less prevalent in the cohorts from Sweden (1.2%), Spain (2.6%), and USA (2.5%). The cluster G-B-W accounted for 12.7% of subjects with MetS with higher occurrence in Southern Europe (Italy, Spain, and Portugal - with 31.4%, 18.4%, and 17.1% respectively) and in Belgium (20.4%), than in Northern Europe (Germany, Sweden, and Lithuania - with 7.6%, 9.4%, and 9.6% respectively). The analysis of the distribution of MetS suggested that what follows under the common definition of MetS is not a unique entity rather a constellation of cluster of MetS components, likely selectively risky for CV disease, whose occurrence differs across countries.

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