The novel predictor of metabolic risk in patients with polycystic ovary syndrome: could it be the visceral adiposity index?

- OBJECTIVE: Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is the most common endo-crinological disorder in women of reproduc-tive age, often accompanied by high androgen levels, irregular menstrual cycles and polycys-tic ovaries. In addition, patients with PCOS al-so present with an increase in abdominal ad-ipose tissue and insulin resistance. Recently, the gender-specific mathematical formulation called visceral adiposity index (VAI) has been widely used in assessing cardiometabolic risk. This study aimed at comparing the VAI values of patients with PCOS, patients with idiopathic hir-sutism (IH) and a control group.PATIENTS AND METHODS: We obtained de-mographic data, laboratory results and anthro-pometric measurements of patients from the hospital database. We retrospectively grouped all cases included in the study as PCOS (n = 52), IH (n = 57) and control (n = 58) according to the diagnoses. We also took venous samples for hormone and biochemical tests in the early fol-licular phase of the menstrual cycle, at least 8-10 hours after fasting in the early morning hours. Finally, we evaluated the variables using SPSS 22.0 software (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY, USA).RESULTS: We included 167 female individu-als in the study. Of these, 57 (34.1%) were diag-nosed with IH, while 52 (31.1%) were diagnosed with PCOS. The control group comprised 58 (34.8%) healthy female individuals. The medi-an age of the study group was 25 years [inter -quartile range (IQR) = 8 years]. The age, height, weight, body mass index (BMI) and waist cir-cumference values of the groups were similar. We found that the VAI values among the groups were significantly different (p = 0.028). Post-hoc analysis determined that this was due to the dif-ference between the group with PCOS and the control group. In addition, we found significantly high HOMA-IR, fasting insulin and androgen levels in the group with PCOS (p < 0.001).CONCLUSIONS: After comparing data in groups with similar BMI levels, we found signifi-cantly high VAI values in patients with PCOS. The results reinforce the idea that VAI is a use-ful marker easily obtained in daily practice for assessing the cardiometabolic risk of patients with PCOS.