# BMI alternative for identifying obesity ‘could prevent misdiagnosis in millions’

- URL: https://talkfuse.com/story/bmi-alternative-for-identifying-obesity-could-prevent-misdiagnosis-in-millions/
- Published: 2026-11-11T16:00:53+00:00
- Updated: 2026-11-11T16:25:25+00:00
- Original publisher: The Guardian (publisher lean: Left)
- Original article: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/nov/11/bmi-alternative-obesity-diagnosis-body-mass-index
- Topics: World

## Key points

- BMI alone can miss or misdiagnose obesity.
- A proposed approach adds body measurements and organ function tests.
- Most people with pre-clinical obesity did not develop active disease within 10 years.

## Summary

Experts say combining BMI with body measurements and tests of organ function could improve obesity diagnosis and care. Their analysis suggests BMI alone misses obesity in 5% to 9% of adults and wrongly labels up to 3%, potentially affecting tens of millions of people.

Researchers analysed health records from more than 800,000 people in the UK, US, China and Spain, tracking health for up to 15 years. The proposed method uses BMI alongside waist measurements and waist-to-height ratio, then distinguishes clinical obesity, where excess fat impairs organ function, from pre-clinical obesity, where it poses a risk without current impairment. Under this definition, only about a quarter to a third of people classified as obese had clinical obesity; 80% to 90% of those with pre-clinical obesity did not progress to clinical obesity within 10 years.

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Summarised by TalkFuse (https://talkfuse.com/). Quote the original publisher for the reporting and link this page for the summary and discussion.