Response

Bosomworth reflects on the comment of Dr. Abrahim about his article "Normal-weight central obesity. Unique hazard of the toxic waist," published in the June issue of Canadian Family Physician. There is little doubt that waist circumference (WC) should be a very unreliable measurement for the proportion of visceral to subcutaneous (SC) fat, and there is even no universal consensus surrounding where to measure or what the measurement cutoff value for risk should be. In spite of this, the anthropometric measures of abdominal obesity have surprisingly high correlations with mortality. Perhaps if we had simple and reliable ways of measuring only the high-risk visceral component, the association would be even stronger.