Sagittal abdominal diameter shows better correlation with cardiovascular risk factors than waist circumference and BMI

BACKGROUND: Obesity (abdominal adiposity) is a risk factor for cardiovascular diseases and the most used methods to measure the adiposity are body mass index (BMI), waist circumference (WC), and sagittal abdominal diameter (SAD). OBJECTIVE: To correlate BMI, WC, and SAD with biochemical parameters and blood pressure in adults. METHODS: A non-experimental exploratory/descriptive and cross sectional study was developed and it was assessed 133 subjects (59 men and 74 women) aging between 18 and 87 years. It was registered the patients’ weight (kg), height (m), BMI (kg/m(2)), WC (cm) and SAD (cm), and these parameters were correlated with glycemia, triglycerides, total cholesterol, HDL-c, LDL-c and blood pressure. RESULTS: After adjustment for gender and age, it was observed a positive correlation between SAD and systolic arterial blood pressure (r = 0.20), glycemia (r = 0.20), triglycerides (r = 0.32), LDL (r = 0.26), total cholesterol (TC) (r = 0.33), and a negative correlation with HDL-c (r = −0.21) (p < 0.05). It was observed a positive correlation between WC and systolic arterial blood pressure (r = 0.14), triglycerides (r = 0.31), total cholesterol (r = 0.21), and a negative correlation with HDL-c (r = −0.24) (p < 0.05). BMI showed a positive correlation with systolic arterial blood pressure (r = 0.22), total cholesterol (r = 0.20), and triglycerides (r = 0.23) (p < 0.05). CONCLUSION: SAD correlated with almost all the cardiovascular risk factors analyzed and it might be considered the best predictor of abdominal fat and cardiovascular risk. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/2251-6581-12-41) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.