Elevated Levels of High Sensitivity C-Reactive Protein are Associated with Metabolic Syndrome in a Representative Korean Sample

Abstract

Metabolic syndrome (MetS) defines a group of cardiovascular risk factors affecting the development of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes [1,2]. The most common abnormalities of MetS components are abdominal obesity, elevated triglycerides (TG), reduced high-density lipoprotein (HDL), elevated blood pressure, and elevated fasting glucose [3]. The prevalence of MetS in the 2011-2012 Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES) data was 31.3% [4]. High sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP) is a crucial marker of systemic low grade inflammation [5,6]. Epidemiological studies have shown a strong positive association between elevated levels of hsCRP and MetS and its components [7,8,9,10]. It has also been proposed that hsCRP be added as a clinical criterion for MetS [11]. Several studies have evaluated the association between hsCRP and MetS [7,11,12,13,14]. A significant association has been reported between hsCRP and MetS in the United States using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey [8,9]. In addition, a few studies have investigated the association between hsCRP and MetS in the Asian population [15-17]. However, previous Asian population studies are limited to hospital-based patient [15], community-dwelling women [17], and health screening populations [10, 16], which makes it difficult to generalize the results. No study has investigated the distribution of hsCRP concentrations in a representative sample of the Korean population. Thus, we analyzed hsCRP concentration for the first time in the 2015 KNHANES data.