Reliability of Head, Neck, and Trunk Anthropometric Measurements Used for Predicting Segment Tissue Masses in Living Humans

Abstract

Soft and rigid tissue mass prediction equations have been previously developed and validated for the segments of the upper and lower extremities in living humans using simple anthropometric measurements. The reliability of these measurements has been found to be good to excellent for all measurement types (segment lengths, circumferences, breadths, skinfolds). However, the reliability of the measurements needed to develop corresponding equations for the head, neck, and trunk has yet to be determined. The purpose of this study was to quantify the inter- and intrameasurer reliability of 34 surface anthropometric measurements of the head, neck, and trunk segments. Measurements (11 lengths, 7 circumferences, 11 breadths, 5 skinfolds) were taken twice separately on 50 healthy, university-age individuals using standard anthropometric tools. The mean inter- and intrameasurer measurement differences were fairly small overall, with 64.7% and 67.6% of the relative differences less than 5%, respectively. All measurements, except for the right lateral trunk, had intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) greater than 0.75, and coefficients of variation (CVs) less than 10%, indicating good reliability overall. These results are consistent with previous work for the extremities and provide support for the use of the defined surface measurements for future tissue mass prediction equation development.

Head, Neck, Trunk, and Pelvis Tissue Mass Predictions for Older Adults using Anthropometric Measures and Dual-Energy X-Ray Absorptiometry

“…Flexible measuring tapes, anthropometers (Layfayette Instrument Company, Layfayette, IN) and skinfold callipers (Slimguide ® , Creative Health Products, Plymouth, MI) were used to take 32 anthropometric measurements (Table 1: nine lengths, seven circumferences, eleven breadths and five skinfolds) were collected from participants while they stood in anatomical position by teams of two investigators trained on the proper techniques for collecting reliable anthropometric data. These measurements have been shown to have good between-and within-measurer reliability, with coefficients of variation (CVs) of <10% for all measurements (George et al, 2017). Participant age, sex, height and body mass were also recorded.…”

“…Ratios of the skewness and kurtosis statistics to their respective standard errors were calculated to examine normality of the generation sample; distributions were considered normal if ratios did not greatly exceed ± 1.96 at P < 0.05 (Stevens, 2002). To reduce multicollinearity, several highly correlated predictor variables (r ≥ 0.8) were identified using correlation matrices and either combined into construct variables through Principal Component Analysis or removed from the regression analysis (Talmage et al, 1986), based on the reliability of their measurement (George et al, 2017). Overall, 16 prediction equations (four body segments: head, neck, trunk, pelvis x four tissue types: FM, LM, WM, BMC) were generated using multiple linear step-wise regression (SPSS 22 -IBM SPSS Statistics, IBM Corporation, Somers, NY), with personal (sex, age) and anthropometric data as predictors of tissue mass.…”