The relationship of waist circumference distribution to blood pressure levels among children and adolescents in Shandong, China

Metabolic syndrome among children and adolescents from Southern Italy: Contribution from the Calabrian Sierras Community Study (CSCS)

“…3) further points to the potential atherogenic contributions of these ratios [23][24][25][26][27] and reinforces the interesting observations obtained among 6895 children and adolescents aged 7-17 years from Shandong, China, in whom WC/height ratio and WC were correlated with systolic BP [36] which was more recently confirmed among 38,810 students from the same geographic area [39] as was among Mexican preschoolers [40] but with some uncertainties among German adolescents [41]. These results underscore the importance of the prevention of abdominal obesity and the interest of following up an easy to obtain parameter such as WC/height ratio (and WC in any case), in order to prevent future-related problems such as hypertension in children and adolescents.…”

“…Direct comparisons with currently available pediatric data from geographically-and ethnic-defined populations are difficult as either age-ranges differ from those reported here (6-14 years) being in general much larger and rightward displaced (10-18 years) [33,34] or the investigations just concentrated on anthropometric (WC, waist-hip relationship, WC/height ratio, BMI) versus fewer cardiovascular risk factors (mainly systolic and diastolic BP) [35][36][37][38][39][40][41] often measured in scanty subsamples [35]. However, among children and adolescents of both genders, WC in countries and populations largely different, from Brazil [35] to China [36][37][38] and from Mexico [40] to Germany [41] was a predictor of BP, better than BMI, particularly when the WC/height ratio was used [39,40].…”

“…It should be of interest to evaluate whether adding WC/height and/or triglycerides/HDL cholesterol ratios might have an impact. Future investigations and/or meta-analyses, using these proposals, may compare MS prevalence in pediatric ages: among Indo-and Southern-Europeans, MS prevalence was relatively low, around 4% [2][3][4][5][6][7]34] yet of importance to be diagnosed for preventive purposes [33,34,36,39]. Future studies need to concentrate not only on geographic distributions but also on ethnicity and on related dietary habits differences [13,14,28,[31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41] along with the complex interaction with sexual maturity [7].…”

“…However, among children and adolescents of both genders, WC in countries and populations largely different, from Brazil [35] to China [36][37][38] and from Mexico [40] to Germany [41] was a predictor of BP, better than BMI, particularly when the WC/height ratio was used [39,40]. On the other hand, there were only two large and recent school-based studies in Emirati [33] and Iranian [34] children and adolescents whereby the association of anthropometric measures with cardiovascular risk factors and MS were investigated either in overall subjects [33] or in normal-weight individuals [34].…”

Intensified association between waist circumference and hypertension in abdominally overweight children

“…Waist circumference (WC) is considered an ideal predictor of abdominal adiposity in children [6,7]. Previous studies have demonstrated that abdominal fat plays an important role in the pathogenesis of hypertension in childhood [8], and children with larger WC tend to show a higher level of blood pressure (BP) [9,10].…”