Body Composition for Weight Loss

What Physicians Need to Know

The Advanced Body Composition® Assessment, available with the BodyLogic™ scan on the Horizon® DXA system, visually presents data from BodyLogic scan in a series of easy-to-read graphical reports. Results are available immediately and use color mapping to identify fat, lean muscle mass, and bone.

The reports provide detailed information on your patients’ Body Fat %, Lean Muscle %, and Visceral Fat with a comparison against the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) database of age, gender and race matched peers. You can quickly assess and explain the state of a patient’s health.

Additionally, regularly scheduled BodyLogic scans during the course of a patient’s weight management program will show if the weight loss is from fat stores – or from muscle. The Rate-of-Change report, a key report available with the Advanced Body Composition® Assessment, visually displays changes in a patient’s body over time, enabling patients and clinicians to assess and adjust treatment programs.

Overall, the Advanced Body Composition® Assessment serves as an additional tool to monitor patients’ weight loss and weight management programs. When used in conjunction with weight management programs, data from the Advanced Body Composition® Assessment can be used to help patients lose body fat, not muscle mass, for a more successful and healthier long-term weight loss.

Case Study: Kim

Kim met with Dr. Jarrod D. Meerkin of MeasureUp in Sydney, Australia to undergo a BodyLogic™ scan to find out her ideal body weight to aid in her weight loss journey. Kim entered the meeting with a goal of losing 40 – 50 kilos, or around 88-110 pounds, to end up at 80 kilos, or around 176 pounds. However, after receiving the BodyLogic scan and reviewing her Advanced Body Composition® Assessment, she had a much more accurate picture of her body composition and a better understanding of how much weight she should lose.

During the review of her Advanced Body Composition® Assessment report, Kim found out that to reach her ideal body weight, she only needed to lose 23 – 28 kilos, or around 50 – 62 pounds. Thanks to the BodyLogic scan, Kim left the meeting with a much more attainable goal.

VAT Assessment

The InnerCore™ Visceral Adipose Tissue (VAT) Assessment, which is available with the BodyLogic™ scan, provides a more convenient way to estimate a patient’s visceral fat in the abdominal region. Deep visceral fat is metabolically active and is often associated with diseases like diabetes, hypertension, impaired fasting glucose, impaired glucose tolerance, and metabolic syndrome. Fortunately, the BodyLogic scan can distinguish between visceral fat and subcutaneous fat, giving clinicians a unique understanding of the potential diseases that could be putting their patients at risk. BodyLogic scans, available on the Horizon® DXA system, are substantially equivalent to computed tomography in measuring visceral fat, with the advantages of being more accessible, less costly and delivering a small fraction of the radiation dose.¹

¹Practical and Technical Advantages of DXA Visceral Fat Assessment Compared with Computed Tomography, Thomas L. Kelly, Senior Principal Scientist, Hologic, Inc.
²Courtesy of M. Punyanitya, Image Reading Center, New York, NY