The British journal of nutrition
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Comparative Study
Evaluation of equations for fat-free mass based on anthropometry in infants and young children in South Asia.
Rapid postnatal growth in low-birth weight infants increases the risk of hypertension, CHD and type 2 diabetes in adult life. To provide validated tools to study the growth in South Asian infants, we evaluated two published equations to measure total body water (TBW) and fat-free mass (FFM) based on anthropometry in 6- to 24-month-old infants, using 2H2O dilution. In a method-comparison study in seventy-eight infants aged 6-24 months (forty-two girls and thirty-six boys) from the urban poor attending an immunisation clinic of a hospital in Kolkata, we measured their length to the nearest 0.1 cm, weight to the nearest 10 g and TBW using 2H2O dilution. ⋯ There is a good agreement for FFM derived by AN-2 with 2H2O dilution. The former is 1% lower than that obtained from the reference method (P=0.28). The AN-2 equation is useful for evaluating FFM in infants in India.