{"doi":"10.3389/fcvm.2020.522123","title":"Cardiovascular Anthropometry: What Is Best Suited for Large-Scale Population Screening in Sub-Saharan Africa?","abstract":"Background : Body mass index (BMI) measures overweight/obesity. It, however, especially in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), misclassifies cardiometabolic risk. Central obesity measures are superior. We therefore sought to compare BMI, waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) and abdominal height (AH) in predicting cardiovascular disease risk in sub-Saharan Africa. Methods : Subjects had blood pressures, BMI, and WHR determined. Blood pressure was taken, weight and height measured to generate BMI, and AH measured with a new locally fabricated abdominometer. The ability of the anthropometric indices in identifying abnormal individuals needing intervention was assessed with sensitivity, specificity, and area under the receiver operator characteristic curve. Results : Adults totaling 1,508 (728 M/780 F) adults were studied. For BMI, 985 (65.3%) were normal, while 375 (24.9%), consisting of 233 males and 142 females, had normal WHR. Blood pressure was normal in 525 (34.8%) and 317 (21.0%) for systolic and diastolic blood pressures, respectively. Using BMI as gold standard, sensitivity, specificity, positive, and negative predictive values for WHR in males were 80.7, 37.5, 62.5, and 19.3%, respectively. For females and in the same order, they were 62.0, 34.3, 65.7, and 38.0%. For AH, it was equal in both genders at 82.6, 39.2, 60.8, and 17.4%. By receiver operating curves comparing AH, WHR, and BMI against blood pressure detection, the area under the curve was 0.745, 0.604, and 0.554 for AH, BMI, and WHR, respectively. Conclusion : Abdominometer-derived AH has a better sensitivity and greater area under the receiver operator curve compared with BMI and WHR in this sub-Sahara African population; implying superiority as a cardiovascular anthropometric index.","journal":"Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine","year":2020,"id":105876,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":8,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.8756,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":511989,"name":"AI Zoakah","orcid":"0000-0003-1856-7753","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":512559,"name":"Christian O. Isichei","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":371013,"name":"Atiene S. Sagay","orcid":"0000-0002-5715-8365","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":283131,"name":"Chad J. Achenbach","orcid":"0000-0003-4847-7249","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":511990,"name":"Basil N. Okeahialam","orcid":"0000-0001-5351-1734","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":512558,"name":"Hadiza Agbo","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":34,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:12:23.770754Z","pmid":"33344511","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}