Obesity and association of anthropometric indicators with risk factors in teachers

The aim of this study was to verify general and central obesity, as well as the association of anthropometric indicators with cardiovascular risk factors (CvRF) in teachers of the private network of Viçosa-MG. A cross-sectional observational study was conducted with 150 teachers. Body mass index (BMI), conicity index (CI), body adiposity index (BAI), waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), waist-to-height ratio (WHtR), waist circumference (WC), abdominal circumference (AC) and body fat percentage (%BF); systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP); glycemia (GL), total cholesterol (TC), high density lipoprotein (HDL-C), low density lipoprotein (LDL-C) and triglycerides (TG) were evaluated. The prevalence of general and central obesity was calculated in addition to the simple linear regression to verify the association of anthropometric indicators between themselves and with CvRF. General and central obesity was identified in 19% and 17% of teachers respectively. The best associations between anthropometric indicators were between BMI and WHtR (R² = 0.81), WHtR and AC (R² = 0.78) and BMI and AC (R² = 0.76), all of which were positive. Between anthropometric indicators and CvRF, the best associations were found between WHtR and TG (R² = 0.25), AC and SBP (R² = 0.18) and WHR and HDL-c (R² = 0.19), the first two associations being positive and the last negative. It was concluded that approximately one in five teachers presented obesity. The general obesity indicator, BMI, was positively associated with anthropometric indicators and with most CvRF. However, central obesity indicators presented greater explanatory power on CvRF