Introduction:

Metabolic syndrome (MS) is a public health problem without appropriate strategies for prevention, diagnosis and treatment in children. Existing criteria are controversial and not applicable for pediatric population, with variations according to different authors and expert committees, which could have important consequences in MS diagnosis, treatment and prognosis.

Objective:

To validate different definitions (NCEP-ATPIII; Cook, Ford and Duncan, et al; Ferranti, et al; Cruz, et al; and IDF1) for metabolic syndrome diagnosis in Mexican children.

Methodology:

Cross-sectional study of 2599 children aged between 6 and 16 years, residents of Mexico City. MS was defined as the presence of three or more of the five components in the different criteria; and two or more components with the presence of central obesity for IDF. The Gold Standard was considered as the combination of the five diagnostic criteria. To identify the best predictive value, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV) and likelihood ratio were calculated.

Results:

A greater proportion of individuals diagnosed with the Ferranti, et al criterion was observed in comparison with the other criteria evaluated. We proposed an ad hoc criteria which showed a high sensitivity (0,89) and specificity (0,90) compared to the Gold Standard applied.

Conclusion:

Our diagnostic criteria contains a choice of simple and low-cost components that will facilitate its application in health institutions and will unify-diagnostic criteria, treatment, and prognosis, reducing morbidity and mortality rates in Mexican population.