DXA and Bioelectrical Impedance: Evaluative Comparison in Obese Patients in City of Cáceres

Obesity is a health problem known to increase the morbidity and mortality of individuals. Although widely used, body mass index is not considered a good parameter to assess harmful levels of body fat, since is not a good predictor of mortality. Several new methods have been proposed over the years, such as the waist-to-hip radio. Nevertheless, the predictive ability of this method is still inconclusive. This study presents two new evaluation methods (bioelectrical impedance and dual energy x-ray) and assesses the accuracy of both. We evaluated 30 obese patients. The measurements were taken in the morning after a minimum period of 4 h of fasting, with an interval of 10 min between assessments. There was an improvement in the evaluative capacity of BIA in relation to DXA, when compared to previous studies. This led to an equivalence in the evaluative capacity of both formats for assessing body composition.