Nutritional assessment and cardiovascular risk factors in university adolescents

In recent years some authors have broadened the evidence of how poor nutrition can turn the university student into a direct target of suffering from cardiovascular disease, the result of which can lead to early death. Therefore, the objective of this research was to relate the anthropometric nutritional status and the presence of cardiovascular risk factors of the university students of the first year of Bioanalysis, University of Carabobo, Venezuela (2016-2017). The study was descriptive, correlational, field and cross-sectional in 90 adolescents of both sexes. Anthropometric, clinical and biochemical variables, the alcohol and tobacco consumption, as well as adherence to the Mediterranean diet and the physical activity were evaluated. The Kolmogorov-Smimov, Student's t, Mann Whitney U, Chi(2), Pearson and Spearman tests were used. In descending order of frequencies, the cardiovascular risk factors (CVRF) present were dyslipidemia (72.2%), low physical activity (54.4%), low quality diet (26.7%), smoking (22.2%), abdominal obesity (13.3%), hypertension (5.6%) and impaired fasting glycemia (1.1%). Additionally, the nutritional status was not associated with the aforementioned CVRF. However, the waist circumference was correlated with the systolic blood pressure (r=0.444; p=0.000), but it did not correlate with the rest of the CVRF studied (p>0.05). In the studied university adolescents, the presence of CVRF was observed as well the weight deficit, which would reflect the economic situation that the country went through during the time the investigation lasted.