Objective: To identify predictors of increasing waist circumference (WC) over a 5-year period in a contemporary population of Australian adults. Design: Longitudinal national cohort of adults participating in the Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle Study (AusDiab). Settings: Australian adults in 2000 and 2005. Subjects: A total of 2521 men and 2726 women aged $25 years at baseline who participated in AusDiab and provided anthropometric measurements at baseline (1999)(2000) and follow-up (2005). Results: A $5 % increase of baseline WC occurred in 27 % of men and 38 % of women over the 5-year period. In the multivariate analysis of the total population, there was a higher risk of $5 % gain in baseline WC in women, younger people, people with a lower baseline WC, people who never married compared with married/de facto, current smokers compared with never smokers, people with a poorer diet quality and people with a low energy intake. However, there was no significant association with many expected predictors of waist gain such as physical activity. There were some associations between other lifestyle factors and change of WC by sex, age, level of education and across WC categories, but the associations differed across these groups. Conclusions: A $5 % increase of baseline WC occurred in a significant proportion of men and women over the 5-year period. Of the behavioural factors, poor diet quality was the key predictor of the $5 % increase of baseline WC in this cohort. The findings highlight the need to understand better the causal role of lifestyle in regard to increasing WC over time.
Keywords
Waist circumferenceWeight gain Obesity Predictors DietRecent reports have shown faster increases in waist circumference (WC) than BMI (1,2) , suggesting that the nature of excess body weight may be changing over time to one of greater central adiposity, rather than a more peripheral distribution of body fat (1,2) . This has significant implications, considering that WC measures the central or abdominal distribution of excess body fat, which appears to be strongly correlated with metabolic and cardiovascular risk (3,4) . However, little is known about the drivers of increases in WC. Few studies have examined the predictors of increasing weight in adults, and we are not aware of any that have examined a range of behavioural lifestyle factors potentially predictive of abdominal weight gain. Table 1 summarises those studies exploring predictors of change in BMI, weight and/or WC. The only study we were able to source that explored behavioural predictors of change in WC examined a limited selection of predictors in women (5) . Previous cross-sectional analyses have found lifestyle factors such as higher television (TV) viewing time and lower levels of physical activity to be associated with higher WC (6)(7)(8)(9) , and studies analysing predictors of gain in BMI/weight have found associations with factors such as higher TV viewing time and lower levels of physical activity (5,(10)(11)(12)(13)(14) . Sternfeld et al...