Adiposity Measures and Its Association with Blood Pressure Level Among a Group of School Going Sunni Muslims of Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India

Abstract

The incidence of hypertension (HTN) is on rise across the globe. It is the highest in low-income countries and the obesity/adiposity have a great impact on that. The aim of the present study was to find out the association between some measures of adiposity with blood pressure (BP) levels and to identify the gold standard in determining HTN. This cross-sectional study was conducted among 159 adolescent school going children from a suburban area near Lucknow, India. T-test, correlation coefficient and the Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) curve analyses were utilized to measure the potential predictors of HTN. Significant sexual dimorphisms were noticed in case of waist circumference (WC), systolic BP (SBP) and mean arterial BP (MAP). The differences of hip circumference (HC) and body mass index (BMI) among the normotensive and hypertensive participants were statistically ( p < .05) significant. Considering the association of SBP, diastolic BP (DBP), MAP and pulse pressure (PP) with adiposity, indices were statistically ( p < .01) significant. In sex-combined situation, BMI (AUC = 0.632) had best predictive quality, followed by HC (AUC = 0.606), waist-to-height ratio (WHtR; AUC = 0.598) and WC (AUC = 0.594). This study strongly suggests that abdominal adiposity may be considered as one of the important risk factors of cardiovascular diseases (CVD). And finally, ROC analysis tells us that in sex-combined situation, BMI had highest significant predictive ability for the detection of HTN.