The 3rd International Congress on Abdominal Obesity (ICAO 2012) is a highly anticipated event that will build on the success of last year’s Congress, held in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The Congress’s primary objective is to bring together medical professionals from all specialties to exchange ideas and information about and raise awareness of abdominal obesity as a new modifiable risk factor which, along with traditional risk factors, plays a central role in this new concept of global cardiometabolic risk.This relatively new Congress’s innovative multidisciplinary approach has facilitated the development of a new medical paradigm, whereby complications as hypertension, dyslipidemia, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease are no longer evaluated and treated in isolation.