ANTHROPOMETRIC MEASUREMENTS - NHRI



ANTHROPOMETRIC MEASUREMENTS

Anthropometric measurements give you an assessment of the patient's fatness or leanness and body fat distribution. Does the patient appear fat, thin or wasted? Flabby or muscular? Could the patient be described as more 'pear-shaped' or more 'apple shaped' (i.e excess abdominal fat). The methods used to answer these questions are described below (Body Mass Index, Skinfold thicknesses, Upper arm muscle circumference, waist to hip circumference). These measures provide additional guides to a patient's adiposity or 'leanness', and can be used as baseline measures for assessing improvement. They can be particularly useful if your patient takes up exercise. In this situation total body weight may not change or may increase due to increased muscle mass, where as fat mass may have decreased. A change in fat mass due to exercise is often not detected by measuring weight alone (since muscle is much heavier than fat); measurement of skinfold thicknesses will be more sensitive to changes in fat mass.

Body Mass Index

The Body Mass Index (BMI) provides a simple, yet accurate method of assessing whether a patient is at risk from either over-or-underweight. However, a proportionally greater lean body mass and/or skeletal frame size can contribute to apparent excess body weight. Many athletes, for example would be considered 'overweight', yet skin-fold tests show a sub-normal amount of adipose tissue. It can easily be calculated by dividing the patient's weight (kg) by the square of their height (metres) i.e

BMI = weight (kg)

[(height (m)]2

Many studies have shown that both men and women from 18 years onwards with a BMI between 20-25 have the least risk of morbidity and mortality. The BMI figure more closely reflects adiposity than any other single weight-for-height relationship.

|BMI |CLASSIFICATION |

|Over 30 |Obese |

|25-30 |Overweight |

|20-25 |Healthy weight range |

|20-18 |Underweight |

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