Monitoring Body Measurement

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Monitoring body measurement or also known as anthropometry can be defined as a practical and immediately applicable technique for assessing patient’s nutrition and overall health. Anthropometry also helps nurses and other health care professions to evaluate progress in pregnant women, adults, children, elders, and adolescents. It also measures body composition overtime. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3176514. Anthropometric measurements include weight and height, lean tissue and fat fold measurements. It also includes measuring the head circumference of an infant to assess brain development in infants. Anthropometry is also useful in measuring abdominal girth or measure enlargement of abdominal organs or fluid retention. http://www.angelfire.com/art/nutrition/CHAPTER16.html …show more content…

According to Russel and Elia (2010), one in four patients are already malnourished prior to their admission to the hospital therefore it is crucial to conduct accurate body measurement from admission onwards to ensure the right level of nutritional support is maintained. National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (2006) also recommends that all inpatients, outpatients, people who are admitted in care homes must be nutritionally screened. The fundamental part of nutritional screening is accurately recording body measurements (Clarkson, 2012). It is also essential for calculating drug dosage accurately and oedema gain or loss. Furthermore, it is also important for admitted patients who may need specialist equipment such as profiling beds for pressure relief …show more content…

BMI is one of the widely used tool in clinical settings to estimate body fat percentage. It uses height and weight to determine if an adult is at a healthy weight range, underweight, overweight, or obese http://www.healthdirect.gov.au/body-mass-index-bmi-and-waist-circumference. According to Barton (2010), BMI is a simple tool for clinicians to screen people who are at greater risk in developing weight related disease. People with high BMI are known to be more susceptible to coronary heart disease, cancer, hypertension, and diabetes mellitus. Experts also found that people with increased BMIs have higher incidences of premature death https://www.healthstatus.com/health_blog/body-fat-calculator-2/body-fat-vs-bmi/. The World Health Organisation (2006) states that the normal BMI range for a healthy adult is between 18.5 to 24.9. http://apps.who.int/bmi/index.jsp?introPage=intro_3.html& BMI can be easily gathered because measuring height and weight are inexpensive to obtain and can be easily standardised to minimize errors. BMI only requires little transformation of data to construct therefore making it an ideal tool in clinical settings

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