The assessment of the amount of fat in the human body from measurements of skinfold thickness

Abstract

I . Skinfold thickness and body density were measured on 105 young adult men and women 2. The correlation coefficients between the skinfold thicknesses, either single or multiple, A simple method of assessing quantitatively the fat content of the human body, which could be used not only in laboratories and in hospital, but in field studies and in general medical practice, would be invaluable. Methods in use at present, based on measurements of body density, body water or body potassium, can be applied only in the laboratory and usually to small numbers of subjects.Several previous papers have suggested relationships between one of the accepted methods of determining body fat and a simpler technique which could be widely applied. As early as 1921, Matiegka (1921) formulated an equation for calculating body fat from measurements of surface area and six skinfold thicknesses. Brotek & Keys (1951) were the first to use the relationship between skinfold thickness and body density for assessing fat content. The skinfolds chosen were not ideal and their formula has not been widely used. Pascale, Grossman, Sloane & Frankel (1956) in the USA produced an equation, and PaPizkovL (1961 a ) in Czechoslovakia a nomogram, for predicting fat content from skinfold thicknesses. Steinkamp, Cohen, Gaffey, McKay, Bron, Siri, Sargent & Isaacs (196 j ) gave predictive equations based on measurements of body circumferences and skinfold thicknesses on 167 subjects in California. The only comparable attempt on a British population, to our knowledge, is a study on twenty-four hospital patients, measurements being made of total body water and skinfold thickness (Fletcher, 1962).Information about a wide range of body types in population groups in Britain is required. The present paper describes a study on 105 young adults and 86 adolescents. By means of results from measurements by anthropometry including skinfold thicknesses and body density, an attempt has been made to formulate simple equations for the prediction of the quantity of fat in the body. The subjects were of varying body build-thin, intermediate, plump, but very few were obese.https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi

Anthropometric body fat composition reference values in Spanish adolescents. The AVENA Study

“…In 1967, Durnin and Rahaman (1967) already reported equations for the assessment of BF% from skinfold thickness measurements in British adolescents. Another field method to assess body fat percentage is bioelectrical impedance.…”

Skinfold thickness measurements are better predictors of body fat percentage than body mass index in male Spanish children and adolescents

“…That is the reason why a certain number of equations have been developed for the prediction of body density from simple anthropometric measurements. The most widely known, use skinfold thicknesses as independent variables (Deurenberg et al, 1990;Durnin & Rahaman, 1967;Slaughter et al, 1988;Johnston et al, 1988;Brook, 1971).…”

Body fat measurement in adolescents: comparison of skinfold thickness equations with dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry

“…There are a group of logarithmic (Durnin & Rahaman, 1967;Brook, 1971;Durnin & Womersley, 1974;Johnston et al, 1988;Deurenberg et al, 1990;Sarría et al, 1998) and linear equations (Sloan et al, 1962;Wilmore & Behnke, 1970) that predict the body density first, and then %FM from body density with any of the equations performed by Siri (1961), Lohman et al (1984) and Weststrate and Deurenberg (1989). Other groups of quadratic (Slaughter et al, 1988) and linear (Slaughter et al, 1988;Lean et al, 1996;Bray et al, 2001) equations predict %FM directly from skinfold thicknesses.…”

“…The quantity of body fat mass and its distribution pattern are influenced by gender and pubertal development stage, more than by age. In spite of this fact, few %FM prediction equations from skinfold thickness have been performed specifically for adolescents (Durnin & Rahaman, 1967;Durnin & Womersley, 1974;Slaughter et al, 1988;Deurenberg et al, 1990;Sarría et al, 1998), and their validation against reference methods has been tested only in prepubertal children (Reilly et al, 1995;Wells et al, 1999;Bray et al, 2002;Parker et al, 2003) and in a group of female adolescents (Wong et al, 2000). The purpose of the present study was to compare the most commonly used equations for prediction of body fatness from skinfold thickness, in male and female adolescents, assessing their degree of agreement with %FM measured using DXA as reference method.…”