“Visceral fat is “invisible,” and it can be difficult to find out how much a person’s body has stored. To do so, specialists must conduct expensive tests, such as MRI and CT scans or dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry.
Yet, in their study — the results of which appear in Nature Medicine — the researchers developed an easier, more cost-efficient method of estimating body fat that allowed them to then conduct further analyses, establishing how this form of fat contributed to health risks.”
“To measure the amount of visceral fat, advanced and costly diagnostic imaging techniques are required. We have developed a simple method, which instead estimates an individual’s amount of deep belly fat from other parameters more easily measured than the visceral fat itself, and the method can, therefore, be used in most clinics.”
Torgny Karlsson, Ph.D.