BMI tagged posts

AI repurposes routine chest X-rays to catch silent bone loss before fracture

AI repurposes routine chest X-rays to catch silent bone loss before fracture
Credit: Shu-Han Chen / St. Paul’s Hospital / National Taiwan University

Osteoporosis is a silent disease where bone loss develops gradually before fractures occur. Current clinical screening recommendations mainly focus on older women and selected high-risk groups, leaving some men, younger adults, and individuals with normal body weight completely outside routine screening pathways.

To close this care gap, researchers from St. Paul’s Hospital and National Taiwan University have demonstrated how AI can leverage routine chest X-rays to detect asymptomatic bone loss, closing critical gaps in screening healthy Asian populations. Their paper is published in the journal npj Digital Medicine.

Strikingly, the study found that more than half of the confirmed abnormal bone-density cases...

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New BMI uses AI to reveal hidden metabolic disorders

New BMI reveals hidden metabolic disorders

Researchers at Leipzig University and the University of Gothenburg have developed a novel approach to assessing an individual’s risk of metabolic diseases such as diabetes or fatty liver disease more precisely. Instead of relying solely on the widely used body mass index (BMI), the team developed an AI-based computational model using metabolic measurements. This so-called metabolic BMI shows that people of normal weight with a high metabolic BMI have up to a fivefold higher risk of metabolic disease. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Medicine.

The conventional body mass index, calculated using height and weight, may indicate overweight but does not reflect how healthy or unhealthy body fat actually is...

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Excessive body fat around the middle linked to smaller brain size, study finds

Mark Hamer, G. David Batty. Association of body mass index and waist-to-hip ratio with brain structure. Neurology, Jan. 9, 2019; DOI: 10.1212/WNL.0000000000006879

Carrying extra body fat, especially around the middle, may be linked to brain shrinkage, according to a study published in the Jan. 9, 2019, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. For the study, researchers determined obesity by measuring body mass index (BMI) and waist-to-hip ratio in study participants and found those with higher ratios of both measures had the lowest brain volume.

BMI is a weight-to-height ratio. It is determined by dividing a person’s weight by the square of their height. People with a BMI above 30.0 are considered obese...

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