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What kind of Relationship is Between Body Mass Index and Body Fat Percentage?

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Abstract

Although body mass index (BMI) and body fat percentage (B F %) are well known as indicators of nutritional status, there are insuficient data whether the relationship between them is linear or not. There are appropriate linear and quadratic formulas that are available to predict B F % from age, gender and BMI. On the other hand, our previous research has shown that artificial neural network (ANN) is a more accurate method for that. The aim of this study is to analyze relationship between BMI and B F % by using ANN and big dataset (3058 persons). Our results show that this relationship is rather quadratic than linear for both gender and all age groups. Comparing genders, quadratic relathionship is more pronounced in women, while linear relationship is more pronounced in men. Additionaly, our results show that quadratic relationship is more pronounced in old than in young and middle-age men and it is slightly more pronounced in young and middle-age than in old women.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia within the projects: ON 174026 and III 044006, and by the Provincial Secretariat for Higher Education and Scientific Research of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina within the project: 114-451-2856/2016-03.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Trg Dositeja Obradovića 6, 21000, Novi Sad, Serbia

    Aleksandar Kupusinac & Andrea Katić

  2. Medical Faculty, University of Novi Sad, Hajduk Veljkova 3, 21000, Novi Sad, Serbia

    Edita Stokić & Olivera Rankov

  3. Faculty of Electronic Engineering, University of Niš, Aleksandra Medvedeva 14, Niš, 18000, Serbia

    Enes Sukić

Authors
  1. Aleksandar Kupusinac
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  2. Edita Stokić
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  3. Enes Sukić
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  4. Olivera Rankov
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  5. Andrea Katić
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Correspondence to Aleksandar Kupusinac.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Advances in Big-Data based mHealth Theories and Applications

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Kupusinac, A., Stokić, E., Sukić, E. et al. What kind of Relationship is Between Body Mass Index and Body Fat Percentage?. J Med Syst 41, 5 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-016-0636-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-016-0636-9

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