Background:

There are several scales to calculate the cardiovascular risk of patients at the outpatient level; however, most of them require the measurement of parameters that involve high costs or waiting time for the results.

Objective:

The objective of this study was to show the capacity of some anthropometric measures for the prediction of cardiovascular risk in an adult population of a Colombian State University.

Materials and methods:

Ninety-eight working individuals of a State university with an average age of 50.6 ± 7.5 years were evaluated in 2014. For each person, the variables gender, age, height, weight, percentage body fat (%BF), body mass index, blood pressure (BP), percentage of hand grip strength (%HGS), midline level waist circumference (MLW), waist-to-hip ratio, waist-to-height ratio, fruit and vegetable portions ingested per day, and cigarette smoking were recorded. Subsequently, in 2018, the participants were contacted and were asked about new medical diagnoses of cardiovascular type that they would have had in the time elapsed since the evaluation.

Results:

Eighty-three individuals participated in the new evaluation (2018). The MLW was an independent risk factor associated with type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM) OR: 1214 (95% CI, p = 0.010) and the %BF associated with high BP (HBP) OR: 1137 (95% CI, p = 0.028).

Conclusion:

MLW and %BF are economic anthropometric measurements techniques that can help predict the risk of developing DM and HBP at 4 years.

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