[Measurement of body composition in daily practice]

During the last few years bioimpedance analysis (BIA) devices have been heavily promoted for body composition measurements in daily medical practice. The accuracy of these devices is not exactly known. Accordingly we compared in this study 6 different BIA devices, 3 different skinfold callipers with dual energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA) as the reference methodology. The correlation coefficient between the fat mass assessed by the BIA devices as compared to the DXA methodology varied between r = 0.880 and r = 0.947 (p for all < 0.001). The accuracy of the measurements was better in women than in men and better in individuals with a BMI > 25 kg/m2 than in individuals with a BMI < 25 kg/m2. For daily use the BIA devices are much more user-friendly than the skinfold callipers. It is obvious that the use of the BIA measurement in daily practice does not help much in the assessment of obesity but more so in the assessment (quantification) of the lean body mass (LBM).