Standard anthropometric measures used to diagnose obesity in the general population may not have the same performance in patients with rheumatoid arthritis.
To determine cutoff points for body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference (WC) for detecting obesity in women with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) by comparing these standard anthropometric measures to a dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA)-based obesity criterion.
Adult female patients with more than six months of diagnosis of RA underwent clinical evaluation, with anthropometric measures and body composition with DXA.
Eighty two patients were included, mean age 55±10.7 years. The diagnosis of obesity in the sample was about 31.7% by BMI, 86.6% by WC and 59.8% by DXA. Considering DXA as golden standard, cutoff points were identified for anthropometric measures to better approximate DXA estimates of percent body fat: for BMI value≥25kg/m
A large percentage of patients were obese. The traditional cutoff points used for obesity were not suitable for our sample. For this female population with established RA, BMI cutoff point of 25kg/m