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Lipid accumulation product and visceral adiposity index are effective markers for identifying the metabolically obese normal-weight phenotype

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Abstract

Aim

Studies have identified the metabolically obese normal-weight (MONW) phenotype, which carries increased risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. We aimed to investigate the ability of lipid accumulation product (LAP) and visceral adiposity index (VAI), two markers of visceral obesity, to identify the MONW phenotype.

Methods

Normal-weight participants [body mass index (BMI) being of 18.5–23 kg/m2] (n = 3,552; 46.9 % men) in the 2009 nationwide China Health and Nutrition Survey were included in our analysis. Four different criteria that have been published were used to define the MONW phenotype. LAP and VAI were calculated according to published formula.

Results

Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis revealed that, regardless of the definition used to define MONW phenotype, both LAP [area under the ROC curve (AUC) ranging from 0.606 to 0.807 depending on the criteria used for MONW phenotype] and VAI (AUC ranging from 0.611 to 0.835 depending on the criteria used for MONW phenotype) outperformed anthropometric parameters including BMI, waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio, and waist-to-height ratio for identifying MONW phenotype. Both LAP and VAI were strongly related to the MONW phenotype, irrespective of the criteria used to define the MONW phenotype. The associations between the 4th quartile of LAP and the MONW phenotype or between the 4th quartile of VAI and the MONW phenotype were consistently seen in various subgroups.

Conclusion

Our study demonstrates that both LAP and VAI are effective markers for identifying the Chinese adults with MONW phenotype.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the China Health and Nutrition Survey, supported by the NIH (R01-HD30880, DK056350, and R01-HD38700), and the National Institute of Nutrition and Food Safety, China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Carolina Population Center, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Fogarty International Center for providing the data used here. We also thank the China-Japan Friendship Hospital and Ministry of Health for support for CHNS 2009 survey.

Conflict of interest

Tingting Du, Xuefeng Yu, Jianhua Zhang, and Xingxing Sun declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical standard

The study was approved by the institutional review committees of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the National Institute of Nutrition and Food Safety, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the China-Japan Friendship Hospital, Ministry of Health.

Human and Animal Rights disclosure

All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all patients for being included in the study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Endocrinology, Tongji Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430030, China

    Tingting Du, Xuefeng Yu & Jianhua Zhang

  2. Department of Anesthesiology, Tongji Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430030, China

    Xingxing Sun

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  1. Tingting Du
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  2. Xuefeng Yu
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Correspondence to Jianhua Zhang or Xingxing Sun.

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Du, T., Yu, X., Zhang, J. et al. Lipid accumulation product and visceral adiposity index are effective markers for identifying the metabolically obese normal-weight phenotype. Acta Diabetol 52, 855–863 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00592-015-0715-2

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