The measurement of body composition and outcome in critically ill patients

In this thesis, the association between body compositions, measured using CT scans, and outcome in critically ill patients were investigated. Low muscle mass was associated with higher hospital mortality. However, in this thesis, chronic diseases that were associated with the loss of muscle mass rather than muscle loss itself mainly caused this. When measuring muscle loss during ICU admission, researchers must be aware that the fluid retention in the tissues may cause an overestimation of muscle mass measurements. When measuring visceral adipose tissue, it is important to use gender- and population-specific cut-off values, for internal abdominal fat, these cut-off values were not available. The current thesis investigated whether cut-off values can be determined above which the amount of internal abdominal fat causes a health risk. An increased amount of internal abdominal fat appeared to be a better predictor for increased health risk than BMI. However, in the current study, no relationship was found between BMI or the amount of internal abdominal fat and mortality.