Fat distribution is now regarded as of equal or greater importance to total fat as a health risk and new techniques of measuring fat distribution have recently been developed. Abdominal fat has been regarded as one of the key indicators and measures of this include waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) and the Gonidty or C-Index. Visceral fat, which in the future is likely to prove to be the most powerful predictor of disease, can only be measured in vivo, or in live organisms, through the imaging machines discussed below. How-ever, estimates can be made from techniques that measure abdominal fat including WHR, and the C-index, and more recently using techniques to measure sagittal diameter (SAD), or a measure of abdominal thickness known as the abdominal diameter index (ADI).
Conicity Index (C-Index). The C-Index was developed by Dr Radolfo Valdez and colleagues from Pennsylvania State University in an attempt to combine the best aspects of BMI with WHR or body fat distribution. The C-Index quantifies fat shapes as lying between two extremes; the first a cyclinder, i.e. very lean, and the second, bi-conical.
So far the C-Index has had only limited validatory research carried out on it, some suggesting it may not add significandy to other anthropometric measures. However, variations to this in the future may offer promise for a more sensitive measure.
The C-Index requires measures of height, weight and waist circumference and the following formula:
C = abdominal girth (at umbilicus) in metres/0.109/weight (kg)/height(m)
The range of scores is from 1.00 to 1.73 but, as yet there are no normative figures for comparison. People scoring towards the low end i.e 1.00, are closer to the ideal than those scoring towards the high end i.e. 1.73. The validity of the measure is so far unknown, although reliability and sensitivity could be expected to be quite high.
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