With Central Obesity in a Rural Japanese Population The Tanno and Sobetsu Study

A ccording to the new InternationalDiabetes Federation (IDF) defini-tion of metabolic syndrome, for a person to be defined as having metabolic syndrome they must have central obesity defined by waist circumference (1). In the definition, there are some ethnic or coun-try-specific differences in the cutoff points of waist circumference, and Japa-nese cutoff points have been separately established in the IDF definition (85 cm for men and 90 cm for women). The Japanese Society of Internal Medicine and eight related scientific societies have also jointly announced new Japanese criteria of metabolic syndrome using the same cutoff points of waist circumference (2). However, the impact of central obesity us-ing the cutoff points as a risk of type 2 diabetes is not known. In this study, we investigated the in-cidence of type 2 diabetes in citizens of two rural communities in Japan to deter-mine the relationship between type 2 di-abetes and central obesity, and we also investigated the independent effects of central obesity compared with those of overall obesity