Associação entre fatores de risco cardiometabólicos e perímetro do pescoço em adolescentes

Abstract

Adolescence is a transition phase, between childhood and adulthood, where physiological growth occurs in the vast majority of organs and body tissues, including adipose tissue, favoring the excessive accumulation of body fat, closely related to the development of cardiometabolic risk factors. Neck circumference is an alternative, simple, practical and consistent anthropometric measurement, which reflects the accumulation of subcutaneous fat in the upper part of body, considered a dysfunctional fat deposit and directly associated with metabolic changes, in addition to minimizing the interference of psychological factors of body exposure in identifying cardiometabolic risk in this population. This study aimed to evaluate the association of the main cardiometabolic risk factors with the measurement of neck circumference in adolescents treated at the outpatient clinic of the Adolescent Health Studies Center at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. This is a cross-sectional analytical observational study, carried out with adolescents of both sexes, aged between 12 and 18 years old. The adolescents underwent anthropometric assessment, including weight, height, neck circumference and waist circumference; biochemical assessment including serum lipid profile (total cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, LDL cholesterol and triglycerides) and glucose profile (fasting glucose, glycated hemoglobin, serum insulin and HOMA-IR) and blood pressure measurement. Pearson's correlation coefficient was used to evaluate the correlation between variables, Hopkins' criteria to evaluate the strength of the correlation coefficient and linear regression to evaluate the association between them. The final sample consisted of a total of 360 adolescents, 194 of whom were girls (53.89%), with a mean age of 14.37 (SD: 1.75) years. Neck circumference was positively and significantly (p<0,001) correlated with all variables studied. These correlations were strong between neck circumference and the anthropometric variables body weight (r:0,80), body mass index (r:0,78) and waist circumference (r:0,78). Only the correlation with HDL cholesterol was negative (r:-0,27). The linear regression analysis showed a statistically significant (p<0,001) relationship between the measurement of neck circumference and all variables studied, with the exception of total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol and fasting blood glucose, which remained after adjustment for sex, age and sexual maturation. Thus, the results obtained in this study demonstrate that there is a relationship between neck circumference, accumulation of abdominal visceral fat, changes in the lipid profile, glucose profile and blood pressure, strengthening the use of neck circumference measurement as a predictor of cardiometabolic risk in adolescents.