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Metabolic syndrome in obese children and adolescents in Serbia: prevalence and risk factors

  • Rade Vukovic EMAIL logo , Dragan Zdravkovic , Katarina Mitrovic , Tatjana Milenkovic , Sladjana Todorovic , Ana Vukovic and Ivan Soldatovic
Published/Copyright: March 4, 2015

Abstract

Objective: To assess the prevalence of metabolic syndrome (MS) in obese children and adolescents in Serbia.

Subjects and methods: The study group consisted of 254 subjects (148 female and 106 male), aged 4.6–18.9 years with diet-induced obesity (body mass index ≥95th percentile). Presence of MS using the International Diabetes Federation definition was assessed in all subjects, as well as oral glucose tolerance test and insulin resistance indices.

Results: Overall prevalence of MS in all subjects aged ≥10 years was 31.2%, namely, 28.7% in children aged 10 to <16 years and 40.5% in adolescents ≥16 years. When adjusted for age, gender and pubertal development, higher degree of obesity was a strong predictor of MS. Multivariate analysis showed that taller subjects and those with higher degree of insulin resistance were at significantly higher risk of MS, independent of the degree of obesity.

Conclusions: High prevalence of MS emphasizes the need for prevention and treatment of childhood obesity.


Corresponding author: Dr. Rade Vukovic, Department of Endocrinology, Mother and Child Health Care Institute of Serbia “Dr Vukan Cupic”, Radoja Dakica 8, 11 070 Belgrade, Serbia, Phone: +381 11 3108193, Fax: +381 11 3108257, E-mail:

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the kind assistance of the doctors and nurses at the Mother and Child Health Care Institute of Serbia “Dr Vukan Cupic”. There are no funding sources to disclose. The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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Received: 2014-12-27
Accepted: 2015-2-4
Published Online: 2015-3-4
Published in Print: 2015-7-1

©2015 by De Gruyter

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