Concordance among diagnostic criteria for metabolic syndrome is inconsistent in Spanish adolescents.
BACKGROUND
The metabolic syndrome (MetS), although more frequent in adults, is a growing health problem in adolescent population. There are different criteria for the diagnosis, however without a consensus of which is the best to be used in this population. The heterogeneity of the different diagnostic criteria makes it necessary to 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 for diagnosis 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 was diagnosed by eight different criteria.


RESULTS
The criteria proposed by the IDF showed the highest mean values for WC and systolic blood pressure in boys and girls with MetS, and the lowest for glucose and triglycerides in boys. Depending on the diagnostic criteria used, the prevalence of 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 concordant 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 criteria suggests the need to validate uniform criteria for the diagnosis of MetS in adolescents.
['Fernández-Aparicio|Ángel|Á|https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1298-8349', 'Perona|Javier S|JS|https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5919-993X', 'Schmidt-RioValle|Jacqueline|J|https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2775-0058', 'González-Jiménez|Emilio|E|https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5103-6028']
D000293:Adolescent D001786:Blood Glucose D001794:Blood Pressure D002648:Child D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies D005260:Female D006801:Humans D008297:Male D024821:Metabolic Syndrome D015995:Prevalence D012737:Sex Factors D013030:Spain D013599:Systole D014280:Triglycerides D055105:Waist Circumference
metabolic syndrome adolescents anthropometric indexes diagnosis criteria