Best anthropometric discriminators of incident type 2 diabetes among white and black adults: A longitudinal ARIC study.

Abstract

ObjectiveTo determine which anthropometric measures are the strongest discriminators of incident type 2 diabetes (T2DM) among White and Black males and females in a large U.S. cohort.MethodsWe used Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities study data from 12,121 participants aged 45-64 years without diabetes at baseline who were followed for over 11 years. Anthropometric measures included a body shape index (ABSI), body adiposity index (BAI), body mass index (BMI), waist circumference (WC), waist to hip ratio (WHR), waist to height ratio (WHtR), and waist to hip to height ratio (WHHR). All anthropometric measures were repeated at each visit and converted to Z-scores. Hazard ratios and 95% confidence intervals adjusted for age were calculated using repeated measures Cox proportional hazard regression analysis. Akaike Information Criteria was used to select best-fit models. The magnitude of the hazard ratio effect sizes and the Harrell's C-indexes were used to rank the highest associations and discriminators, respectively.ResultsThere were 1,359 incident diabetes cases. Higher values of all anthropometric measures increased the risk for development of T2DM (p ConclusionsBMI, the most commonly used anthropometric measure, and three anthropometric measures that included waist circumference (i.e., WC, WHR, WHtR) were the best anthropometric discriminators of incident T2DM across all race-gender groups in the ARIC cohort.