Effect of visceral fat on onset of metabolic syndrome

This study analysed the effects of visceral fat on metabolic syndrome (MetS) and developed an algorithm to predict its onset using health examination data from the Iwaki Health Promotion Project in Japan. The dataset included 213 cases of MetS onset within three years and 1320 non-onset cases. The data was split into training and test sets with an 8:2 ratio. In the training set, the MetS onset group had significantly higher visceral fat area than the non-onset group (p < 0.00001). A cut-off value of 82 cm2 for the visceral fat area was determined, with an AUC of 0.86. Additionally, a machine learning algorithm utilizing seven non-invasive factors, including visceral fat, achieved high accuracy with a five-fold cross-validation AUC of 0.90 in the training set and 0.88 in the test set. Visceral fat was identified as the main factor, as supported by the SHAP value. In conclusion, this study found visceral fat to be crucial in predicting the onset of MetS, and a high-accuracy onset prediction algorithm based on non-invasive parameters, including visceral fat, was developed.