Waist-to-height ratio is a better discriminator of cardiovascular disease than other anthropometric indicators in Kurdish adults.

It has been suggested that abdominal obesity might be a better cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) discriminator than overall obesity. The most appropriate obesity measures for estimating CVD events in Kurdish populations have not been well-recognized. The objective of the present study was, therefore, to determine the cutoff points of BMI, waist circumference (WC), waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), and waist to height ratio (WHtR) as the diagnostic cut-offs to discriminate the prevalent cardiovascular diseases. The data collected from Ravansar Non-Communicable Disease (RaNCD) cohort, the first Kurdish population-based study, was analyzed. The information related to BMI, WC, WHR and WHtR of 10,065 adult participants in the age range of 35-65 was analyzed in this study. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analyses were conducted to evaluate the optimum cut-off values and to predict the incidence of cardiac events. The results showed that WHtR had the largest areas under the ROC curve for cardiac events in both male and female participants, and this was followed by WHR, WC, and BMI. The optimal cut-off values for determining the cardiac events in the Kurdish population were BMI = 27.02 kg/m for men and BMI = 27.60 kg/m for women, WC = 96.05 cm in men and 99.5 cm for women, WHRs = 0.96 in both sexes, and WHtR = 0.56 for men and 0.65 for women. The current study, therefore, showed that WHtR might serve as a better index of prevalent cardiac event than BMI, WHR and WC.