Background: Exercise is an important tool in the prevention of cardiovascular risk. Counter-intuitively, elite athletes and military have been found to have high cardiovascular risk. This study aimed to identify underlying cardiovascular risk in young trained military using different parameters including the leptin: adiponectin (L:A) ratio.
Methods: Healthy military males (N.=54) participated in this study. Anthropometric and body composition were measured. After overnight fasting, the following parameters were determined: plasma lipid profile, electronegative-LDL, leptin and adiponectin concentrations. Data were expressed as median (25th and 75th percentiles). The relationship between variables was tested using the Spearman correlation test, with statistical significance set at P<0.05.
Results: Total cholesterol (143 [130-157] mg/dL), triglycerides (TG; 88.5 [63-116] mg/dL) and LDL cholesterol (77.6 [68.8-94.5] mg/dL) plasma levels were adequate. However, all participants were found to have HDL cholesterol below 60 mg/dL (43 [40-49] mg/dL) and 44% (N.=24) had a TG:HDL ratio (2.0 [1.4-2.9]) above 2.0. The L:A ratio was higher than 0.32 for 29% (N.=16) of the participants. The main correlations observed were between waist circumference (WC) and WC:height ratio, with TG (r=0.37; r=0.56), TG:HDL ratio (r=0.41; r=0.36), HDL (r= -0.344; r= -0.26), and L:A ratio (r=0.25; r=0.46).
Conclusions: Trained military men could be classified as at borderline cardiovascular risk when considering only their lipid profiles. However, this observation may be misleading, since lipid profiles are altered by very intense and long exercise. The L:A ratio be should be monitored more closely to establish whether a relationship exists between WC and WC:height and the L:A ratio has potential diagnostic.