This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citation map  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Citing articles on ISI (2)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related article  • Similar articles in this journal  Topic Collections  • Obesity  • Aging/ Geriatrics  • Alert me on articles by topic

Watch Your Waist, Not Just Your Weight

Frank B. Hu, MD, PhD

Arch Intern Med. 2007;167(9):875-876.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

More than 170 years ago, Quetelet, a mathematician in Belgium, developed an index of weight uncorrelated with height (calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared) to evaluate an individual's adiposity status.¹ The index, widely known as body mass index (BMI), also called the Quetelet index, has remained the most widely used measure of obesity to this day. Despite its simplicity, this index has been found to be strongly correlated with adiposity assessed by gold standards such as body density measurements.² Also, the validity of other weight-height indexes, such as the Benn index (weight/height^p), has not been found to be superior to that of BMI (in which p = 2).³

Numerous epidemiologic studies have demonstrated that BMI is a robust and strong predictor of chronic diseases, including hypertension, diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disease, and major forms of cancer.⁴ Body mass index also predicts premature . . . [Full Text of this Article]

AUTHOR INFORMATION

RELATED ARTICLE

Abdominal Adiposity and Mortality in Chinese Women
Xianglan Zhang, Xiao-Ou Shu, Gong Yang, Honglan Li, Hui Cai, Yu-Tang Gao, and Wei Zheng
Arch Intern Med. 2007;167(9):886-892.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT  

THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES

Expanding Evidence for the Multiple Dangers of Epidemic Abdominal Obesity
Cameron and Zimmet
Circulation 2008;117:1624-1626.
FULL TEXT  

Abdominal Obesity and the Risk of All-Cause, Cardiovascular, and Cancer Mortality: Sixteen Years of Follow-Up in US Women
Zhang et al.
Circulation 2008;117:1658-1667.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Abdominal Adiposity Has Adverse Effects, Regardless of BMI
JWatch Women's Health 2007;2007:4-4.
FULL TEXT