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

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.

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. Fisher'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.

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).

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.