Assessment of body composition

Abstract

The most prominent health problem facing the global population is from a combined impact of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, where health consequences can include elevated risk for atherosclerosis, dyslipidaemia, insulin resistance, hypertension, liver disease, gallbladder disease, musculoskeletal disorders, and several types of cancer. Continued research is establishing relationships among body composition, ethnicity, genotype, and cardiometabolic risk. Body composition assessment is an interdisciplinary field used for normalization and interpretation of metabolic data, as well as the assessment of nutritional intervention outcome or metabolic risk in overweight and underweight subjects. In order to further these investigations, clinicians and scientists require robust methods to characterize body composition and assess the amount, type (subcutaneous or visceral), and distribution of adipose tissue. Imaging methods are considered by many to be among the most accurate tools available for measuring the different body tissues and organs in clinical research as these methods can provide in depth information about the spatial distribution of the tissues. The focus of this chapter will be on the array of biomedical imaging approaches available for assessing body composition, specifically dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA), computed tomography (CT), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).