Metabolic Syndrome Paediatric Criteria: The Accuracy of Current Abdominal Obesity Criteria

Abstract

The metabolic syndrome in youth is a contemporary topic in international research, with some studies focusing on the potential benefits of a continuous classification instead of a dichotomous classification. Recently, the International Diabetes Federation has recommended using the 90th percentile as the cutoff point of waist circumference for diagnosing the metabolic syndrome in children and adolescents younger than 15 years of age, keeping the remaining variables with the cutoff values for adults. Some researchers question the adequacy of the cutoff set to identify abdominal obesity and why youth took the reference values from adults, suggesting other methods to identify the cutoffs that best compensate for differences in age and gender at this stage of youth development, such as growth curves. The main objective of this work was to examine the validity of the International Diabetes Federation paediatric criteria to diagnose the metabolic syndrome in children and adolescents, with special attention to waist circumference.