The Korean Medicine phenotype as an adjunctive risk factor of Metabolic syndrome: A prospective observational cohort study

Abstract Background The purpose of this study was to investigated whether a specific subtype of the newly proposed Korean Medicine (KM) phenotype could support as a risk to metabolic syndrome (MetS). Methods A dataset of 1997 subjects were used from the Korean Medicine Daejeon Citizen Cohort. To extract the KM phenotype of the participants, questionnaires of sasang constitutional types (SCTs) and cold-heat pattern identification (CHPI) were adopted; correlations with KM phenotype were assessed using Cramer's V test. Odds ratios and the area under the curve (AUC) were used to evaluate the performance of the MetS classification models on the basis of the proposed KM phenotype, single type of SCTs, and single type of CHPI. Results This study included 179 and 1,818 participants in the MetS and non-MetS group, respectively (MetS prevalence rate of 8.96%); the participants’ mean ages were 46.45 and 44.12 years (p < 0.001), respectively. A medium correlation was found between SCTs and CHPI (Cramer's V 0.27). KM phenotype A and B were constructed, and a novel MetS classification model was created, yielding AUC values in the range of 0.762–0.793 for comparisons with existing models. Conclusion The results of this study suggest that the newly proposed KM phenotype is a suitable independent variable for the MetS prediction model. The TE-Heat pattern of KM phenotype may be a risk factor for MetS.