Introduction

Abdominal obesity with visceral fat accumulation has been considered to play an essential role in the development of cardiometabolic disorders including glucose intolerance, dyslipidemia and hypertension, so-called the metabolic syndrome (MetS) [1, 2]. Several epidemiological studies have demonstrated that MetS increases the risk of not only cardiovascular disease (CVD) morbidity and mortality [3, 4], but also the incidence of chronic kidney disease (CKD) [5, 6] and end-stage renal disease (ESRD) [7]. On the other hand, the validity of MetS diagnostic criteria remains controversial. Reaven [8] highlighted the fact that there are many non-MetS patients who are clearly at higher risk of CVD than MetS patients. Furthermore, it has been claimed that MetS does not necessarily predict CVD risk above and beyond its individual components [9, 10]. Some reports have also shown that elevated waist circumference (WC), an indicator of abdominal obesity for diagnosing MetS, is associated with CKD to a less extent after adjusting for MetS components [11,

Conclusion

Replacing WC with ABSI in MetS diagnostic criteria may more efficiently predict people at risk of renal function decline and arterial stiffening. Further studies are needed to confirm whether diagnosis of MetS using ABSI also predicts CVD morbidity and mortality.