Interaction analysis of lipid accumulation product and family history of diabetes on impaired fasting glucose and diabetes risk in population with normotension in Eastern China: a community-based cross-sectional survey

BACKGROUND: Lipid accumulation product (LAP) is considered to be a new convenient useful indicator to assess the visceral fat. Therefore, we aimed to evaluate the risk factors of impaired fasting glucose (IFG) and diabetes, and explore the possible interacting influences of LAP with other factors on the risk of IFG and diabetes among Chinese normotension adults. METHODS: A multistage stratified cluster sampling method was conducted to select urban residents in Bengbu, China. For each eligible participant, data on questionnaire survey, anthropometric measurements and laboratory tests were obtained. The effects of body mass index (BMI), waist circumference (WC), waist to height ratio (WHtR) and LAP for predicting IFG and diabetes were performed by multiple logistic regressions and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analyses. The interaction effects were evaluated by relative excess risk of interaction (RERI), attributable proportion due to interaction (AP) and synergy index (SI). RESULTS: Six thousand, four hundred sixty-seven normotension subjects (2695 men and 3772 women) were enrolled in our study, the prevalence of IFG and diabetes were 9.37% and 14.33%, respectively. When assessed using ROC curve analysis, LAP exhibited higher diagnostic accuracy for identifying IFG and diabetes than BMI, the area under the AUC curve was 0.650 (95% CI: 0.637 to 0.662). After adjustment for age, sex, educational level and other confounding factors, multivariate logistic regression analyses indicated that subjects with the fourth quartile of LAP were more likely to develop IFG (adjusted OR: 2.735, 95% CI: 1.794–4.170) and diabetes (adjusted OR: 1.815, 95% CI: 1.297–2.541) than those with the first quartile. A significant interaction between LAP and family history of diabetes was observed in participants (RERI = 1.538, 95%CI: 0.167 to 3.612; AP = 0.375, 95%CI: 0.118 to 0.631; SI = 1.980, 95%CI: 1.206 to 3.251). However, a significant interaction between LAP and abdominal obesity was indicated by the value of RERI (1.492, 95%CI: 0.087 to 3.723) and AP (0.413, 95%CI: 0.014 to 0.756), but not the value of SI (1.824, 95%CI: 0.873 to 3.526). CONCLUSION: Our results demonstrated that there might be synergistic effect between LAP and family history of diabetes on the risk of IFG and diabetes. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13690-022-00972-6.