This study by Sattar et al. compared two prospective studies: the Prospective Study of Pravastatin in the Elderly at Risk (PROSPER) and the British Regional Heart Study (BRHS). The authors investigated to what extent the metabolic syndrome and its individual components were related to risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes in elderly populations. In the PROSPER study, there was no association between events of cardiovascular disease and the metabolic syndrome or its individual components. In contrast, the metabolic syndrome and each individual metabolic factor were significantly associated with incident diabetes. In BRHS, the metabolic syndrome was weakly associated with incident cardiovascular disease despite being strongly related to diabetes. By comparing two prospective studies, this paper showed that the metabolic syndrome has a negligible clinical association with incident vascular events in elderly people despite strong associations with the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
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