Medico-Legal Update | 2021
Conicity Index as an Anthropometric Index of Central Obesity in the Prediction of Adult Bronchial Asthma; Correlation with Fractional Exhaled Nitrous Oxide Tests
Abstract
Obesity and bronchial asthma (BA) are two major health concerns. These entities have been furtherestablished by several meta-analyses. Still, these analyses denote to ‘‘general-obesity’’, that classicallymeasured via body mass index (BMI), which is a broad measure unable to distinguish between lean musclebulk and body fats. Thus, other indices, should applied like waist perimeter, waist/hip ratio, and conicityindex (CI), which are also reasonable, and normalized easily. Sufficient studies on the BA association withCI are lacking up till now. Our work was designed based on the theory that obesity worsens BA symptoms,aiming to evaluate the asthma relationships and CI.Methodology: This is an observational-study conducted on 410 asthmatics consulting outpatient-respiratoryclinic. They were diagnosed by pulmonologists, then referred for spirometric pulmonary functions (SPF)and fractional exhaled nitric oxide (FENO) tests. Patients’ weight, height and BMI were measured andaccordingly divided into two-classes ‘‘nonobese and obese’’. The X2-test was applied to analyze theassociations among qualitative parameters. Level of significant acceptance was 5%, and the analyses hadcompleted by using the SPSS package.Results: Mean±SD of weight, height, and BMI were 80.9±15.4, 1.64±1.6, and 30.8±5.4, respectively. AObindices were 96.2±14.3, 107.1±10.6, 0.98±0.9 and1.25±0.1 for waist, hip, W/HR, and CI respectively. Themean FENO-measures were 43.8 ppb. There was a significant variation in the means of PEF and FEV1/FVConly, although the FENO-tests were equivalent between the sexes.There was a strong association betweenCI with increasing age. The CI had a weak non-significant association with increasing FENO-results.Conclusion: The conicity index as an anthropometric index of central obesity is not associated with theFENO test among adult asthmatic patients. There was non-significant variation between obese and nonobesegroups. The CI is not useful in the prediction of adult BA.