In the search to understand metabolic disease, prevention and treatments, people are often broadly categorized using relatively crude tools. This removes the individualized perspective. For example, obesity is commonly described using BMI (body mass index – weight in kg / height in m2), and individuals are placed in one of five categories ranging from underweight to obesity. However, the health risks related to obesity are more closely linked with body composition — which is the amount of muscle and fat in the body — than with generalized anthropometric measurements, such as body weight, BMI and waist circumference. The use of such broad, discrete categories like obesity, overweight, normal weight and underweight, or even high liver fat / low liver fat, to describe individuals should be questioned. Such categorizations run the risk of grouping individuals with little resemblance to one another, lacking both accuracy and precision for appropriate metabolic disease identification and management. In this webinar, the speakers introduce body composition profiling with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as an effective tool to manage metabolic disease state.
Among adiposity-related biomarkers currently used for health evaluation, BMI is recommended to identify individuals at increased risk of coronary heart disease and related comorbidities such as Type 2 Diabetes. Although a high BMI correlates with future health risks and predicts morbidity and death on a population scale, it is not effective on an individual scale. Recent research has significantly linked specific fat distributions to adverse cardiometabolic health outcomes, diabetes and liver disease, something that BMI fails to fully describe. In addition, there is heterogeneity in the manifestation of abdominal obesity in fat deposits such as liver, visceral and subcutaneous fat. Further, skeletal muscle is important in this context. Both fatty infiltration and lean muscle volume — or lack thereof, e.g., sarcopenia — are important in metabolic diseases, and are more commonly associated with aging and advanced disease states. Such specific body composition and fat distributions are not assessable using BMI, but can be effectively and precisely described using magnetic resonance imaging MRI-based body composition profiling.
Body composition profiling therefore, greatly individualizes the description of the individual, identifying potential hidden health risks and bringing us one step closer to precision medicine related to both assessment and targeted interventions. In this webinar, the featured speakers — clinical and imaging experts — will review the latest research on the impact of different body composition profiles on metabolic health, disease risk and metabolic disease treatment and development. There will be a special focus on the biologic and clinical perspectives, including why body composition matters and how it can be used to guide treatment.
Join this webinar to gain insights into body composition profiling with MRI, how such measurements have been used in recent research and the recent advancements that have made MRI-based body composition profiling available for clinical use nowadays.
