University of Rome "Tor Vergata"
Unit of Biostatistics
Department of Biomedicine and Prevention
Unit of Human Nutrition
National Institute for Mediterranean Diet and Nutrigenomic, I.N.Di.M.
Predicted Percentage of Body Fat in Women
The percentage of body fat (PBF) in women is predicted based on height, weight, hip and waist circumferences.
A classification of the degree of obesity is given in the following table:
| Age | Underweight | Normal | Preobese | Obese | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
|||||
| <20 | <17.0 | [17.0, 27.0) | [27.0, 32.0) | ≥32.0 | |
| [20,30) | <18.0 | [18.0, 28.0) | [28.0, 33.0) | ≥33.0 | |
| [30,40) | <19.0 | [19.0, 29.0) | [29.0, 34.0) | ≥34.0 | |
| [40,50) | <20.0 | [20.0, 30.0) | [30.0, 35.0) | ≥35.0 | |
| ≥50 | <21.0 | [21.0, 31.0) | [31.0, 36.0) | ≥36.0 | |
The PBF calculator estimates the PBF obtained by Dual X-ray Absorptiometry (DXA) through a predictive equation based on easily available anthropometric measures and offers to clinicians a friendly tool to assess the body fat percentage of their patients. The proposed equation was derived from a sample of 1009 adult Italian Caucasian women who had complete data on both body composition analysis obtained by DXA and anthropometric measures. A multivariate regression model was fitted to the observed data. Weight, height, age, waist, hip circumference and their fractional polynomial transformations were considered as explanatory variables. In order to assess the predictive ability of the proposed equation a validation set of 134 women was used.