Relationship of Five Anthropometric Indices and Blood Pressure in an Adult Chinese Population

Abstract

The study examined the relationship of blood pressure (BP) with anthropometric indices, including body mass index (BMI), waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), conicity index (CI), waist circumference (WC), and hip circumference (HC). The sample consisted of 731 females and 911 males aged 20–60 years randomly recruited from Shanxi Province of PR China. There was an increasing trend of systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), and the five anthropometric indices in successively older age groups. Except for female HC, all the other anthropometric indices were significantly correlated with BPS. Among them, WC and HC exhibited the highest correlations in female (0.38–0.42) and in male (0.36–0.37), respectively. The result indicates that HC is not protective for metabolic risk factors in males. Principal component analysis (PCA) was performed on all the five anthropometric indices and four major principal components (PCs) were obtained to explain greater variances (R² == 0.173–0.212) in BPS than did anyone of five anthropometric indices (R² == 0.0001–0.176). The same analyses were conducted on any two, three, and four indices of the five anthropometric ones, in order to get the smaller and optimal sets of indices to estimate BPs. Our results suggest that BMI, WC, and HC are the smallest set of anthropometric indices to optimally estimate BP for the males, and WC and BMI for the females.

• anthropometric index
• obesity
• blood pressure
• principal component analysis
• Chinese

ACKNOWLDEGEMENTS

We thank three anonymous reviewers for their comments to improve this article. The study was partially supported by a project from Scientific Research Fund of Shanxi Provincial Education Department (200611044). We thank the Affiliated Hospital of Shanxi Workers Medical College for their editorial work on recruiting samples.

Conflict of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.