Cardiovascular Disease: Test Predicts Risk Factors In Teens

A new diagnostic test can help predict a teenagers' risk of developing cardiovascular disease by examining metabolic syndrome. The findings are published in the journal Diabetologia.

"The way that we normally diagnose metabolic syndrome appears to have some racial discrepancies where African-American individuals are not diagnosed with metabolic syndrome at a very high rate, and yet they are at very high risk for developing type 2 diabetes and CVD," said Dr. Mark DeBoer, a researcher in the department of pediatrics at the University of Virginia, in a news release.

Metabolic syndrome is typically composed of a group of conditions that include increased blood pressure, excessive body fat around the waist, high blood sugar and abnormal cholesterol levels--all of which can increase the risk of cardiovascular disease.

During this study, researchers reviewed data on 629 people who participated in the Cincinnati Clinic of the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute Lipids Research Clinic between 1973 and 1976, as well as the Princeton Follow-up Study between 1998 and 2003, and 354 participants in the Princeton Health Update between 2010 and 2014. The studies examined fasting triglycerides, systolic blood pressure, HDL cholesterol and fasting glucose at the average ages of 12.9, 38.4 and 49.6.

Findings revealed that metabolic severity scores for children at the beginning of the study were linked to the development of cardiovascular disease and diabetes in adults.

"The current study was targeted at using that metabolic syndrome severity score on data from individuals who were children in the '70s to see if it correlated with their risk on developing CVD and type 2 diabetes later in life, and we found that there was a high correlation between the metabolic severity score for those children and for their later development of cardiovascular disease and diabetes," DeBoer added. "We are hopeful that this score can be used to assess the baseline risk for adolescents regarding metabolic syndrome and their risk for future disease and use it as a motivator for individuals to try to change their risk so that they may have a healthier diet, engage in more physical activity or get medication to reduce their metabolic syndrome severity and their future risk for disease."

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