OBJECTIVE
To investigate the association of body mass index (BMI) with cardio-ankle vascular index (CAVI).
DESIGN AND METHOD
We analyzed cross-sectional data from 23,257 healthy Japanese subjects (12,729 males and 10528 females) without past history of heart disease, hypertension, stroke, diabetes and nephritis between 20 and 74 (47.1 ± 12.5) years of age who underwent health screening during 2004 to 2006 in Japan.
RESULTS
Male showed markedly higher BMI, CAVI, TG and lower HDL-C. Next, BMI was divided into 3 groups of lower, middle and upper tertile in a gender-specific manner. After adjusting for confounders including age, systolic BP, HDL-C and Non-HDL-C extracted in multiple regression analysis for CAVI, the mean values of CAVI decreased gradually by BMI tertile in both genders. Furthermore, the negative gradient of BMI with adjusted CAVI was seemed constantly throughout. Multivariate logistic regression model demonstrated that the odds ratios (95% CIs) for high CAVI (≥ 90th percentile) were 0.801 (0.716 - 0.897) in Obesity, 15.1 (13.5 - 16.9) in Elderly, 2.28 (2.06 - 2.54) in Male, 2.21 (1.97 - 2.47) in Hypertension, 3.29 (2.81 - 3.86) in Low-HDL-C and 1.06 (0.845 - 1.32) in Impaired fasting glucose.
CONCLUSIONS
We demonstrated the inverse relationship between BMI and CAVI, which revealed that systemic accumulation of adipose tissue, itself, might lead to the decrease of arterial stiffness linearly.