Leptin in obesity and hypertension

Background: Obesity along with hypertension is the common risk factor for the development of cardiovascular disease. Leptin, an anti-obesity hormone, is currently considered to play a vital role in the development of hyperten-sion in obesity. We aim to determine the leptin levels in hypertensive and normotensive participants and to find the correlation between leptin and hypertension in obese and non-obese hypertensive subjects.Material and methods: A total of 94 participants aged > 18 years of either gender were included in the study. The participants were divided into obese (n = 55) and non-obese (n = 39) groups with further subgroups based on pres-ence or absence of hypertension. Height, weight and blood pressure were taken with standard methods. Leptin was determined using ELISA method and intra and inter-group comparisons were made.Results: The leptin levels were significantly higher in obese (p = 0.000), hypertensive (p = 0.048) and females (p = 0.001) compared to non-obese, normotensive and male participants. Furthermore, obese hypertensive partici-pants were having higher leptin levels compared to obese normotensive participants but with no statistical signifi-cance (p = 0.14). Serum leptin levels positively correlated with serum LDL (p = 0.003), body mass index (BMI) (p = 0.000), serum uric acid (p = 0.034) and fasting plasma glucose (FPG) (p = 0.001). However, on correction for factors like BMI, and obesity, positive correlation persisted only for female gender (p = 0.048) and FPG (p = 0.029). Furthermore, BMI (p = 0.021) and FPG (p = 0.027) were found to be the independent risk factors for elevated leptin levels on multiple regression analysis.Conclusions: Our study concluded that serum leptin levels are higher in obesity and have a direct correlation with degree of obesity. However, our study does not support any direct correlation between serum leptin and hypertension.