Cardiovascular risk factors in a child population: The Health Oriented Pedagogical Project (HOPP)

Aims: The main aim of the present study was to investigate the clustering of risk factors for cardiovascular diseases and metabolic syndrome in a large, healthy representative Norwegian child population. Methods: From a population of 2817, parents of 2297 children agreed to participate. Values of waist circumference (WC), total cholesterol (TC), high-density lipoprotein (HDL), systolic blood pressure (sysBP), haemoglobin-A1c (HbA1c) and Andersen aerobic fitness test were used to test clustering of cardiometabolic risk factors in this sample. Expected distributions of probability for zero to five risk factors are, respectively, 23.7%, 39.6%, 26.4%, 8.8%, 1.5% and 0.1%. A cardiometabolic risk score from zero to five for each individual was derived by adding the number of variables in the least desirable quartile (highest for WC, sysBP, TC and HbA1c; lowest for aerobic fitness and HDL). Results: A risk ratio of 5.8 (95% confidence interval 0.7-46.9) was found for five risk factors, though the small sample size rendered the results non-significant. An explorative analysis combining children with four and five risk factors did not reveal any significant clustering either. Conclusions: No clustering of risk factors was found among Norwegian children aged 6-12 years.