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Concerning the use of weight tables to categorize patients with eating disorders
Author(s) -
Drewnowski Adam,
Garn Stanley M.
Publication year - 1987
Publication title -
international journal of eating disorders
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.785
H-Index - 138
eISSN - 1098-108X
pISSN - 0276-3478
DOI - 10.1002/1098-108x(198709)6:5<639::aid-eat2260060507>3.0.co;2-l
Subject(s) - categorization , psychology , population , eating disorders , lean body mass , body weight , clinical psychology , gerontology , demography , environmental health , medicine , computer science , artificial intelligence , sociology
The notion of using weight tables to categorize patients with eating disorders is at best simplistic and at worst inappropriate. Available tables suffer from serious conceptual, sampling, and methodological deficiencies and are especially unsuited for use with young, white middle‐class females: the population at particular risk for eating disorders. For purposes of research, there is no substitute for assessments of lean body mass, percent body fat, and maturational status. For purposes of simple classification, standards based on an appropriate reference population are preferable to the obsolete Metropolitan Life Insurance tables (1959; 1983) and the NCHS (Abraham, Johnson, &Najjar, 1979a, b) tables based on weighted NHANES I weight data.