Association of Smoking Status, Weight Change, and Incident Metabolic Syndrome in Men: A 3-Year Follow-Up Study

Association of Smoking Status, Weight Change, and Incident Metabolic Syndrome in Men: A 3-Year Follow-Up Study Byung Jin Kim , MD, PHD , Bum Soo Kim , MD, PHD , Ki Chul Sung , MD, PHD , Jin Ho Kang , MD, PHD , Man Ho Lee , MD, PHD and Jung Ro Park , MD, PHD From the Division of Cardiology, Department of Internal Medicine, Kangbuk Samsung Hospital, Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine, Seoul, South Korea. Corresponding author: Byung Jin Kim, bjjake.kim{at}samsung.com . Abstract OBJECTIVE We investigated the incidence of the metabolic syndrome and assessed the effect of smoking status and weight change on incident metabolic syndrome. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS This study included 4,542 men without metabolic syndrome at baseline who were followed for an average of 3 years. Subjects were divided into four categories according to smoking status at baseline and at the 3-year follow-up. RESULTS The overall incidence of metabolic syndrome was 10.6%: 8.0% in nonsmokers, 7.1% in new smokers, 17.1% in ex-smokers, and 13.9% in sustained smokers ( P < 0.001). In a multivariate regression model, ex-smokers had significantly increased odds for incident metabolic syndrome with a mean 1.45 (95% CI 1.06–1.98) compared with sustained smokers. This was no longer significant after including weight change. CONCLUSIONS Smoking cessation within 3 years may be a higher risk factor for incident metabolic syndrome than sustained smoking, indicating that weight control in ex-smokers is critical to attenuate the additional risk for incident metabolic syndrome. Footnotes The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. This article must therefore be hereby marked “advertisement” in accordance with 18 U.S.C. Section 1734 solely to indicate this fact. Received January 13, 2009. Accepted April 14, 2009. Readers may use this article as long as the work is properly cited, the use is educational and not for profit, and the work is not altered. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ for details. © 2009 by the American Diabetes Association.