The correlation between obesity and other cardiovascular disease risk factors among adult patients attending a specialist clinic in Kumasi. Ghana

Background: Obesity is a complex and multifactorial disease marker, which has become a major threat to cardiovascular health. We sought to assess the correlation of obesity and other cardio-metabolic risk factors in patients seen at the outpatient specialist clinic in Ghana. Method: A prospective cross-sectional study was conducted on 395 patients at Precise Specialist Clinic in Kumasi, Ghana. A standardized questionnaire was used to obtain demographic, anthropometric and clinical data of patients. Fischer's exact test for statistical significance at a 95% confidence interval was used to evaluate associations between categorical variables. The associations between obesity indices and cardiovascular disease risk factors were analyzed by Pearson's correlation. Results: Of the 395 participants, 187 were males and 208 were females. The mean (+/- standard deviation) age of study participants was 59.29 (+/- 13.93); more than half of the participants were between 50 and 69 years. The mean BMI of male participants was significantly lower than the mean BMI of female participants (28.18 kg/m2 vs 31.16 kg/m2, P-value < 0.0001). Gender was significantly associated with the weight categories (P = 0.0144). Obesity was seen more in females (49.0%) than in males (35.8%). The Pearson correlation analysis also showed a significant positive correlation between obesity, increasing systolic blood pressure (r = 0.1568, P-value = 0.0018) and increasing diastolic blood pressure (r = 0.2570, P-value < 0.0001). Conclusions: Obesity was found to be significantly associated with female gender, increasing age, increasing systolic blood pressure, and increasing diastolic blood pressure. Efforts to step-up preventive measures to reduce the increasing prevalence of obesity in Ghana are highly recommended.