Abdominal obesity modifies the risk of hypertriglyceridemia for all-cause and cardiovascular mortality in hemodialysis patients

Hypertriglyceridemia is the most prevalent lipid alteration in end-stage renal disease, and we studied the relationship between serum triglycerides and all-cause and cardiovascular death in these patients. Since abdominal fat modifies the effect of lipids on atherosclerosis, we analyzed the interaction between serum lipids and waist circumference (WC) as a metric of abdominal obesity. In a cohort of 537 hemodialysis patients, 182 died, 113 from cardiovascular causes, over an average follow-up of 29 months. In Cox models that included traditional and nontraditional risk factors, there were significant strong interactions between triglycerides and WC to both all-cause and cardiovascular death. A fixed (50mg/dl) excess in triglycerides was associated with a progressive lower risk of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality in patients with threshold WC