A Survey on the Relationship of Metabolic Syndrome Components and the Number of Blood Cells Using Count Data Regression Model

• The metabolic syndrome is characterized by a group of metabolic risk factors at increased risk of coronary heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Obese children with metabolic syndrome have at least three of these risk factors. Since the lifestyle changed resulting in the obesity of Iranian children, this syndrome became one of the important concerns in these age groups. There have been many researches on the relationship between this syndrome and number of blood cells in children. However, it was not considered in Iran to some extent. Since the number of blood cells is a counting variable, using traditional statistical methods ends up with erroneous inferences. In this paper, the generalized Poisson model was used to identify the effect of metabolic syndrome on the number of (red and white) blood cells.• 292 obese children in the age group of 6 to 12 years old participated in the children Hospital of Isfahan Medical University for this cross-sectional Study. Metabolic syndrome characteristics were analyzed considering coronary and growth parameters.• Generalized Poisson model, as the best fitting model on the count data, showed that the following two factors, BMI and ratio between triglyceride and HDL-C, significantly affect the number of white blood cells; the ratio between cholesterol and HDL-C, the ratio between triglyceride and HDL-C and the ratio between LDL-C and HDL-C had a significant effect on the number of red blood cells.• This study shows that some of the characteristics of metabolic syndrome affect the number of blood cells.