Figure 2.

Type 2 diabetes and CVD risk factor clustering is called metabolic syndrome. A: Shows that the observed co-occurrence of two or more of elevated fasting glucose (FG), fasting insulin (FI), triglycerides (TG), blood pressure (BP), BMI, or low HDL cholesterol (all defined in A as the extreme 20th percentile, light gray bars for women and dark gray bars for men) co-occur to a far greater degree than would be expected by change alone (compared with a binomial distribution, dashed line, P < 0.0001). B: Shows that the pattern of risk factor clustering for these risk factors (including, as well, glucose levels 2 h after an oral glucose tolerance test [2-h G] and waist-to-hip ratio [WHR]) represent three clinically identifiable phenotypes: impaired glucose tolerance (IGT), hypertension (HTN), and central obesity-dyslipidemia, linked together by obesity (in this figure, BMI) and fasting hyperinsulinemia (reflecting, in part, insulin resistance). C: Illustrates that obesity and insulin resistance constitute the common physiological antecedents leading to increased risk for the development of both type 2 diabetes (T2D) and CVD; the name currently applied to this phenomenon is metabolic syndrome. A and B are adapted from Wilson et al. (7) and Meigs et al. (8). DBP, diastolic blood pressure; SBP, systolic blood pressure.