How bad is belly fat for your health?

The size of excess belly fat could be used to assess your chances of having diseases such as heart failure and type 2 diabetes, reports Daily Mail.  Scientists have developed a new technique to assess the health risks posed by abdominal obesity, or fat that accumulates around the stomach.

Estimating the thickness of the fat around the abdomen could be used to work out the likelihood of suffering from obesity-related diseases, according to researchers. Abdominal obesity is linked to heart failure and metabolic syndrome, a cluster of conditions that lead to type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

One in four adults in the UK are overweight or obese, while one in three of adults living in the US are, according to government statistics.

Lead scientist Professor Jin Keun Seo, from Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, said, "Recent studies have shown that abdominal obesity is linked with diseases such as congestive heart failure and metabolic syndrome. Static electrical impedance tomography, or EIT, could be employed as a non-invasive surrogate of disease progression in these conditions."

EIT is a non-invasive type of medical imaging that picks up on the electrical activity of different body parts to gather images of what they look like.

The imaging technique also provides real-time data without using ionising radiation, which makes it less harmful to patients than other imaging techniques.

Abnormally high deposition of fat tissue in the abdominal area has been associated with diseases such as cancer as well.

Prof Seo added, "EIT is more advantageous since it is non-ionising and can hence be used for continuous patient self-monitoring to track body fat status in daily routines. EIT is a low cost, portable, and easy-to-use bedside technique to image electrical conductivity distribution."

Have something to add to the story? Share it in the comments below.