Concerning the use of weight tables to categorize patients with eating disorders

摘要

AbstractThe 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 dat