Impact of metabolic syndrome on the incidence of chronic kidney disease: A Chinese cohort study

Aim: Metabolic syndrome (MetS) is a major culprit in cardiovascular disease and chronic kidney disease (CKD) in Western populations. We studied the longitudinal association between MetS and incident CKD in Chinese adults. Methods: A cohort study was conducted in a nationally representative sample of 4248 Chinese adults in Taiwan. The MetS was defined according to a unified criteria set by several major organizations and CKD was defined as an estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) < 60 mL/min per 1.73 m2. Cox proportional hazards regression was used to estimate hazard ratios (HR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) adjusted for sex, age, body mass index (BMI) and serum levels of total cholesterol. Results: The prevalence of MetS among participants at baseline recruitment was 15.0% (637/4248). During a median follow-up period of 5.40 years, 208 subjects (4.9%) developed CKD. The multivariate-adjusted HR of CKD in participants with MetS compared with those without was 1.42 (95% CI = 1.03, 1.73). Additionally, there was a significantly graded relationship between the number of the MetS components and risk of CKD. Further, the relation between MetS and incident CKD was more robust in subjects with BMI >27.5 kg/m2 than in those with lower BMI. Conclusion: The results suggest that the presence of MetS was significantly associated with increased risk of incident CKD in a Chinese population. These findings warrant future studies to test the impact of preventing and treating MetS on the reduction of the occurrence of CKD.