Prevalence of Risk Factors for the Metabolic Syndrome in a Global Perspective: A Brief Review

Metabolic syndrome refers to the clustering of a number of risk factors which have the potential to develop cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes mellitus and thus causing an increase in mortality rate. The prediction is that by 2020, there will be an increase by almost 75% in global cardiovascular disease prevalence and almost all of this increase will occur in developing countries. The prevalence of type 2 diabetes mellitus is also rapidly increasing all over the world at an alarming rate. In this paper, we have made an attempt to briefly review and compare the prevalence of metabolic syndrome risk factors in India as well as other regions of the world. We have also compared the metabolic syndrome risk factors for premenopausal and postmenopausal women for sample populations in India, Iran and Korea.