Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Measures commonly used to assess adiposity are often considered to reflect visceral adiposity and hence used as indicators of cardiovascular risk. This study compares common clinical adiposity measures with abdominal MRI, a direct measure of visceral fat, to assess if this relationship applies in patients with abnormal body composition.

Method: Fifty childhood leukaemia survivors (16–26 years) treated with bone marrow transplantation/total body irradiation (group 1, n=20) or chemotherapy alone (group 2, n=30) were studied: i) auxology: body-mass-index (BMI), waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio, waist:height ratio, ii) bioimpedance analysis (BIA): total body fat%, trunk fat%, iii) DEXA: trunk fat mass, android:gynoid fat ratio, iv) L4-5 single slice abdominal MRI: subcutaneous and visceral fat area. v) Blood pressure (BP) and cholesterol, triglyceride (TG) and high density lipoprotein were also obtained. Comparisons between outcomes were explored by Pearson’s correlations.

Results: MRI visceral fat correlated with cardiovascular risk markers (systolic BP, diastolic BP, TG, cholesterol (P≤0.001, 0.01, 0.04, 0.03) respectively). In group 2, all auxological outcomes, DEXA trunk mass and BIA trunk % correlated with both MRI subcutaneous and visceral fat. However, in group 1, with significantly lower lean mass (P=0.009) and sitting heights (P<0.001), BMI (P<0.001) and DEXA total trunk mass (P<0.001) only correlated with subcutaneous fat although waist:hip ratio (P=0.003) and DEXA android:gynoid ratio (P=0.001) correlated with visceral fat. Waist circumference and waist:height ratio correlated with both fat types. No correlation was shown between BIA trunk% and MRI results.

Conclusions: Common methods to assess adiposity may not reflect visceral fat if body composition is abnormal. Corrected values e.g. waist-to-hip and DEXA android-to-gynoid ratios are better surrogate markers. This is relevant for other chronic disease subjects with sarcopenia.