The use of fasting vs. non-fasting triglyceride concentration for estimating the prevalence of high LDL-cholesterol and metabolic syndrome in population surveys.

Background: For practical reasons it is not easy to obtain fasting samples in large population health surveys. Non-fasting triglyceride (Tg) values are difficult to interpret. The authors compared the accuracy of statistically corrected non-fasting Tg values with true fasting values and estimated the misclassification of subjects with high low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) and the metabolic syndrome.