Ethnicity and the Evaluation of Anthropometric Measurements

Reply to Letter by Yarlioglues et al Entitled “Ethnicity and the Evaluation of Anthropometric Measurements”

“…3 Abdominal fat is better reflected by measuring waist to hip ratio (WHR). 3 As stated by Yarlioglues et al, 2 for many populations, widely accepted cutoffs of BMI and WHR are in many instances markedly different from those used for Caucasians. Specifically, a large body of epidemiologic evidences has shown that the Chinese had lower cutoff values than Caucasians.…”

“…We thank the authors for their interest in our article 1 and for the issues addressed in their letter. 2…”

“…Yarlioglues et al 2 state that ethnic disparities in body fat and fat-free mass remain a persistent public health concern. Unfortunately, we did not include this information in our text.…”

“…Another question by Yarlioglues et al 2 is whether percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) procedures were not successful enough and/or postprocedure medical treatment was insufficient. Despite the successful PCI and sufficient postprocedure medical treatment from our center, it is a challenge to determine the actual role of normal weight central obesity in cardiovascular events because of the complex interaction among the various risk factors.…”

“…Furthermore, Yarlioglues et al 2 paid much attention to the baseline characteristics (Table 1 in our text 1 ) for selection of the study population. Mean age was 52.1 ± 3.6 years in patients without normal weight central obesity, since this group actually had some participants younger than 30 years which may affect the standard deviation.…”