Risk Associated With the Metabolic Syndrome Versus the Sum of Its Individual Components

Current guidelines for the preventionof cardiovascular disease (CVD) en-courage identification of the meta-bolic syndrome (a clustering of CVD risk factors) in clinical practice (1,2), but an important unanswered question is whether the metabolic syndrome predicts risk above and beyond its individual com-ponents (3). We investigated this issue using a large cohort of men examined on two occasions 20 years apart and followed for a maximum of 32.7 years. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS — In a community-based cohort ofmen of the same age (available at www.pubcare.uu.se/ULSAM) (4), we in-vestigated four baseline samples: two de-