Prevalence rates of obesity, central obesity, normal weight obesity and the associated factors in a north korean refugee population in south korea

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Background & aims: Obesity is an undesirable outcome of poor life-style habits and behaviors.. Despite the increasing number of NK refugees in South Korea, there is very limited documented information on their health condition, especially in relation to prevalence rate of lifestyle diseases as they accommodating to westernized life style of South Korea. This study was aimed to determine the prevalence rate of obesity, central obesity, normal weight obesity and the associated factors in NK refugees. The relationship among body fat distribution and selected biomarkers are determined to analyze how normal weight obese can be a potential risk for development of the metabolic syndrome
Methods and results: Anthropometric measurement of 340 NK refugees was analyzed. For the comparison, 2008 KNHNES and the clinical examination of 680 adults at the KUMC-Anam were used. The overall prevalence of obesity and central obesity were 24.4% and 21.8%. For the corresponding South Koreans, they were 30.2% and 25.8% respectively. All the subjects were divided with sex-specific tertiles of BF%. Among the normal BMI (18.5-22.9 kg/m2) subjects, the highest tertile of BF was labeled as NWO. The overall prevalence of NK NWO was 4.1% and they showed statistically significant metabolic abnormalities (P=0.013).
Conclusions: NK refugees are in a transition state to developing obesity as they assimilating into South Korean society. The prevalence of NWO in NK refugees was higher compared with SK, and this indicated the increasing risk of cardiometabolic dysregulation among high %BF NK individuals.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Abstract 1
• Introduction 2
• Method and Materials 3
• Study design and subject selection 3
• Questionnaire 3
• Anthropometric measurements and data collection 4
• Additional Data Sources 4
• Definition of normal weight obesity 5
• Statistical analysis 5
• Results 6
• Obesity and Central Obesity 6
• Normal Weight Obesity 6
• Physical Characteristics and metabolic biomarkers in subjects 7
• Associations between metabolic abnormalities and %BF as a continuous variable 8
• Discussion 8
• Conclusion 10
• References 11
• Tables 13
• Figures 18