The fast growing number of people who are obese has made the World Health Organization issue a statement on this matter. Obesity can cause various diseases such as hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, and diabetes. It is also connected with mortality. It is important to lose weight because it decreases the risk of cardiovascular disease and improves insulin sensitivity. Weight loss practices are more and more common, and it is relevant to assess the body composition accurately.
The fast growing number of people who are obese has made the World Health Organization issue a statement on this matter. Obesity can cause various diseases such as hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, and diabetes. It is also connected with mortality. It is important to lose weight because it decreases the risk of cardiovascular disease and improves insulin sensitivity. Weight loss practices are more and more common, and it is relevant to assess the body composition accurately. There are various methods of assessing the body composition- some are more accurate than other, but sometimes their cost is extremely high. There is little research comparing the three methods over a period of weight loss: DXA, bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA), and ADP, before and after a 6-month weight loss program. During the study the researchers used both conventional bioelectrical impedance machines and the Tanita body fat analyzer.
Fifty-six healthy but overweight participants, 34 women and 22 men (age, 52 [+ or -] 8.6 years; weight, 92.2 [+ or -] 11.6 kg; body mass inside (BMI), 33.3 [+ or -] 2.9 kg/[m.sup.2]) were studied in an outpatient setting before and after 6 months of weight loss (weight loss, 5.6 [+ or -] 5.5 kg). Patients were excluded if they began a new drug therapy within 30 days of randomization, attended a weight loss program, or took a weight loss drug within 90 days of randomization. Patients were randomly chosen either to a self-help program, that included two 20-minute sessions with a nutritionist and help of printed materials, or to participation in meetings of a commercial program (Weight Watchers). Body composition was tested by both methods before and after weight loss.
BIA (42.4 [+ or -] 5.8%) underestimated percentage fat, while the BodPod overestimated percentage fat compared with DXA (46.1 [+ or -] 7.9%) before weight loss. Tanita and tetrapolar BIA overestimated FFM before weight loss, while BodPod underestimated FFM. Both BIA and ADP are precise in comparison with DXA. However, the results show that these methods can not be reliable with increasing body fat, which may be connected with hydration status. But the correlation coefficients between each of the methods for body composition in comparison with DXA were high. Whatâ??s more the methods was sensitive enough to detect changes with weight loss. Brozek was more precise than Siri in predicting changes with weight loss. BIA was also more precise than the Tanita scale method. However, we must remember that it would not be effective to use these methods interchangeably to detect body compositional changes over weight loss.
