Risk Associated With the Metabolic Syndrome Versus the Sum of Its Individual Components
- Johan Sundström, MD, PHD1,
- Erik Vallhagen1,
- Ulf Risérus, BM, MMED, PHD2,
- Liisa Byberg, MMED, PHD2,
- Björn Zethelius, MD, PHD2,
- Christian Berne, MD, PHD1,
- Lars Lind, MD, PHD13 and
- Erik Ingelsson, MD, PHD2
- 1Department of Medical Sciences, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
- 2Department of Public Health and Caring Sciences, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
- 3AstraZeneca Research and Development, Mölndal, Sweden
- Address correspondence and reprint requests to Johan Sundström, Department of Medical Sciences, Uppsala University Hospital, SE-751 85 Uppsala, Sweden. E-mail: johan.sundstrom{at}medsci.uu.se
Current guidelines for the prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD) encourage identification of the metabolic syndrome (a clustering of CVD risk factors) in clinical practice (1,2), but an important unanswered question is whether the metabolic syndrome predicts risk above and beyond its individual components (3). We investigated this issue using a large cohort of men examined on two occasions 20 years apart and followed for a maximum of 32.7 years.
RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS
In a community-based cohort of men of the same age (available at www.pubcare.uu.se/ULSAM) (4), we investigated four baseline samples: two defined at age 50 years (the whole cohort [n = 2,322] and a primary preventive sample [n = 2,198], excluding people with a myocardial infarction, stroke, or diabetes at or before baseline) and two at a reexamination at age 70 years (the whole cohort [n = 1,221] …
