AMA #51: Understanding and improving your metabolic health

Once you have metabolic syndrome, you're at an increased risk of everything. Your risk of cardiovascular disease goes up by 135%. Your cardiovascular mortality goes up by 140%. Your all-cause mortality is up by 58%. Your M.I. risk, 99% ... Your stroke, 127%. When you look at cancer, it's a 56% increase in age-adjusted risk of cancer mortality if you have met. syn.

We're now defining truncal obesity as a waist circumference of more than 40 inches in men, more than 35 inches in women. We're defining elevated triglycerides as over 150 mg/dL. We're defining low HDL cholesterol as below 40 mg/dL in men, below 50 in women. We define elevated blood pressure as above 130 over 85, or taking medication for high blood pressure over 120 over 80. And fasting glucose as greater than 100 mg/dL.

Call it 100 million people with metabolic syndrome in the US. But what I think is most interesting is a third of them are not obese.

The largest meta-analysis on this study suggests about a 24% higher risk of Parkinson's disease in those with metabolic syndrome compared to those without.