Concordance among diagnostic criteria for metabolic syndrome is inconsistent in Spanish adolescents

Abstract

Background: The metabolic syndrome (MetS), although more frequent in adults, isa growing health problem in adolescent population. There are different criteria forthe diagnosis, however without a consensus of which is the best to be used in thispopulation. The heterogeneity of the different diagnostic criteria makes it necessaryto carry out more studies that analyse the degree of agreement among these criteria.The present study was aimed to evaluate the agreement between different criteria fordiagnosis of MetS in adolescents.Materials and methods: A cross-sectional study was performed on 981 adolescents(13.2 ± 1.2 years) randomly recruited from 18 schools in south-east Spain. MetS wasdiagnosed by eight different criteria.Results: The criteria proposed by the IDF showed the highest mean values for WCand systolic blood pressure in boys and girls with MetS, and the lowest for glucoseand triglycerides in boys. Depending on the diagnostic criteria used, the prevalenceof MetS cases in boys ranged from 5.5% to 14.9%, while in girls varied from 3.4%to 32.6%. Both in boys and girls, the criteria proposed by the IDF was the less con-cordant with the other suggested criteria, while those proposed by Duncan et al,Rodriguez-Moran et al and Cruz and Goran, were very concordant among each other.However, in girls, concordance values were not as high as those found for boys.Conclusion: The variability observed in the agreement among the existing criteriasuggests the need to validate uniform criteria for the diagnosis of MetS in adolescents.