Keywords:
Tissue characterisation, Outcomes, Metabolic disorders, Normal variants, Diagnostic procedure, Comparative studies, Absorptiometry / Bone densitometry, Musculoskeletal soft tissue, Extremities
Authors:
F. Ponti1, D. Diano1, S. Guerri1, M. Agostini1, M. Amadori1, G. Sadotti1, U. Albisinni2, G. Battista1, A. Bazzocchi1; 1Bologna/IT, 2Bologna /IT
DOI:
10.1594/essr2016/P-0086
Purpose
Evidences concerning the importance of body composition (BC) have grown rapidly in the last few years [1-3].
Identifying physiological or pathological BC changes at limbs relies primarily on the availability of simple and accurate methods for estimating body compartments,
secondly on knowledge of regional fat mass (FM) and non-bone lean mass (LM) in healthy people of different age and gender to be used as reference standard.
This data on healthy subjects from the general population is almost completely missing.
Only a small number of studies have investigated BC at the limbs by dual energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA) [4].
Body composition analysis had mostly focused both on whole body levels and on the molecular and tissue-levels due to the large availability of anthropometric methods (skinfold thickness,
circumferences) and novel imaging techniques.
At the moment DXA represents the gold standard for BC analysis,
allowing reproducible estimation of whole-body and regional FM,
LM and bone mineral content (BMC).
Among anthropometric measurements,
arm circumference (AC),
thigh circumference (ThC) and other calliper measurements (such as skinfold thicknesses) are commonly used in clinical practice for their ease in being performed and their cost-effectiveness [5].
Nevertheless anthropometry suffers from low reproducibility.
The correlation between anthropometry and regional body fat has been deeply investigated [5,6].
Recent evidences suggest that regional fat mass can be predicted accurately using anthropometric variables [5,7-9].
In spite of this,
few authors explored the link between anthropometric parameters and appendicular LM,
especially in adult populations [10-12]; the majority of them focused on the assessment of lower limbs BC [7,8,13].The aims of this study were:
- To investigate the potential correlations between anthropometric and DXA measurements at limbs in healthy people of different age and sex,
focusing on the consequent impact of disagreements between the two methods in the examination of BC.
- To collect and report DXA reference values for BC of left and right limbs (upper and lower) in an Italian population of different gender,
to be used as a reference standard.