About this Research Topic
Body composition, like excess adiposity and muscle mass, has been shown to be associated with the risk of diseases including diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular disease. Moreover, body composition is directly associated with mortality risk. Consequently, assessment of a patient’s body composition is one of the most common risk stratification variables that is collected. In particular, body mass index (BMI) is assessed for essentially every adult and is used to drive treatment decisions.
However, BMI, which is easy to measure in a doctor’s office and a standard measurement to define obesity, has been shown to have some limitations as a risk predictor for different populations. For example, BMI is not as predictive in Asian populations who may have a higher proportion of visceral fat and increased risk of cardiometabolic disorder. Similarly, as patients age they tend to lose lean muscle mass which may contribute to disease risk, and healthy patients with a muscular physique may have an elevated BMI. This has led to concepts like sarcopenic obesity and normal weight obesity. BMI is a screening tool, and clinicians should be aware of proper use of BMI when counselling patients and other assessments of body composition.
Understanding the relationship between accurate body composition and downstream disease risk, and more specifically how we need to measure body composition, is crucial to disease prevention. This Research Topic focuses on the advances in understanding body composition and disease risk, particularly in relation to integration of this understanding into the doctor’s office for assessment of the population. We aim to consider improvements in the assessment of body composition across populations, and how it can practically be used in a doctor’s office. This should help us move the field forward and possibly improve one of the most basic and widely used health assessments.
Manuscripts submitted to this collection could cover areas including, but not limited to:
• Relationship between body composition and health outcomes,
• Methods for assessing body composition,
• Comparative effectiveness of body composition assessment,
• Integration of body composition assessment into clinical practice,
• Discussion of BMI applications and limitations, including stigma and misclassification,
• Relationship between body composition and population health,
• Evaluating pharmacologic effects on body composition,
• Age-related changes, such as alterations in lean body mass and sarcopenic obesity.
We invite authors to contribute to this field of knowledge welcoming Original Research, Review, Mini-Review, Hypothesis and Theory, Perspective, Clinical Trial, Case Report, and Opinion articles. These should focus on humans and priority will be given to clinical outcomes.
However, BMI, which is easy to measure in a doctor’s office and a standard measurement to define obesity, has been shown to have some limitations as a risk predictor for different populations. For example, BMI is not as predictive in Asian populations who may have a higher proportion of visceral fat and increased risk of cardiometabolic disorder. Similarly, as patients age they tend to lose lean muscle mass which may contribute to disease risk, and healthy patients with a muscular physique may have an elevated BMI. This has led to concepts like sarcopenic obesity and normal weight obesity. BMI is a screening tool, and clinicians should be aware of proper use of BMI when counselling patients and other assessments of body composition.
Understanding the relationship between accurate body composition and downstream disease risk, and more specifically how we need to measure body composition, is crucial to disease prevention. This Research Topic focuses on the advances in understanding body composition and disease risk, particularly in relation to integration of this understanding into the doctor’s office for assessment of the population. We aim to consider improvements in the assessment of body composition across populations, and how it can practically be used in a doctor’s office. This should help us move the field forward and possibly improve one of the most basic and widely used health assessments.
Manuscripts submitted to this collection could cover areas including, but not limited to:
• Relationship between body composition and health outcomes,
• Methods for assessing body composition,
• Comparative effectiveness of body composition assessment,
• Integration of body composition assessment into clinical practice,
• Discussion of BMI applications and limitations, including stigma and misclassification,
• Relationship between body composition and population health,
• Evaluating pharmacologic effects on body composition,
• Age-related changes, such as alterations in lean body mass and sarcopenic obesity.
We invite authors to contribute to this field of knowledge welcoming Original Research, Review, Mini-Review, Hypothesis and Theory, Perspective, Clinical Trial, Case Report, and Opinion articles. These should focus on humans and priority will be given to clinical outcomes.
Keywords: body composition, adiposity, disease risk, body mass index, obesity, sarcopenic obesity
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
