Waist circumference a clinical criterion for prediction of cardio-vascular complications in children and adolescences with overweight and obesity

Overweight and obesity in childhood are associated with early cardiovascular dysfunction and promote heightened risk of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in adulthood. Waist circumference (WC) correlates with visceral obesity, which is why obese children with elevated WC need to be carefully monitored to prevent long-term cardio-metabolic complications. The purpose of our study was to establish if WC could be a predictor of cardiovascular complications in children. The authors conducted a retrospective study that included 160 overweight and obese children and adolescents, aged 6 to 18 years. Patients were evaluated completely anthropometrically, biologically, and imagistic. The anthropometric data tracked were height, weight, WC, and body mass index. Echocardiography evaluated the following parameters: the interventricular septum, left ventricular mass, the relative thickness of the ventricular wall, the pathological epicardial fat. Our results confirm that the presence of visceral obesity was significantly associated (χ(2) = 11.72, P = .0006) with pathological epicardial fat. In children, visceral obesity is not a risk factor for vascular or cardiac impairment, but in adolescents, the results showed that visceral obesity is an important predictive factor for the occurrence of vascular (AUC = 0.669, P = .021) and cardiac (AUC = 0.697, P = .037) impairment. Concentric left ventricular (LV) hypertrophy is significantly influenced by the presence of visceral obesity (AUC = 0.664, P = .013 children; AUC = 0.716, P = .026 adolescents). WC above the 90th percentile is a predictive factor for increased LVM index and concentric hypertrophy in both children and adolescents.