Use of Confirmatory Factory Analysis for the Identification of Criteria of the Metabolic Syndrome Among the School Children in South Korea

Yoo, Hana

Monday, 30 July 2012

Hee Soon Kim, PhD, RN
College of Nursing, Department of Family and Child Health Care, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea
Hana Yoo, PhD, RN
Department of Nursing, Korean Bible University, Seoul, South Korea

Learning Objective 1: The learner will be able to identify the diagnostic criteria of metabolic syndrome in the children.

Learning Objective 2: The learner will be able to compare the Western and Korean criteria of metabolic syndrome.

Purpose: The prevalence of obesity in Korean children is estimated to be around 10%, and it has increased significantly over the past 20 years. Metabolic syndrome, which includes central obesity, glucose intolerance, insulin resistance, dyslipidemia and hypertension is a well documented risk factor for cardiovascular diseases, but there is no general consensus concerning its definition for children. Due to variances in diagnostic criteria done in previous research for metabolic syndrome, the prevalence of overweight and obese people has been reported inconsistently. The purpose of this study is to evaluate and compare three competing models of the underlying factor structure of metabolic syndrome in Korean children using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

Methods: This study was performed using previously collected data from the Yonsei Health Coaching Program. We evaluated 306 obese school children between 7 and 12 years old (160 boys and 146 girls), with waist circumference, blood pressure, serum fasting glucose level, triglyceride and HDL-cholesterol. The three hypothesized models were analyzed by means of CFA using IBM AMOS 18.0 for Windows with maximum likelihood estimation.

Results: The results showed that the two-factor model yielded significantly better than other models, with a Comparative Fit Index of 0.923 and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation of 0.076(chi-square= 19.4, df= 7, p< .05).

Conclusion: This is first study to attempt to determine diagnostic indicators of metabolic syndrome for school-age children in Korea. We concluded that the two-factor model of metabolic syndrome was the most plausible model when compared with competing models. It will be a good method to test for metabolic syndrome of Korean school-aged children.

See more of: Research Poster Session 1
See more of: Research Sessions: Oral Paper & Posters