A comparison of body mass index and percent body fat as predictors of cardiovascular risk factors.

Background: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is an important cause of global mortality and morbidity. Body mass index (BMI) is the measure of adiposity that is used most frequently in CVD risk algorithms.

Aims: We aimed to assess the relationship between several CVD risk factors (RFs) and percent body fat (PBF), and to compare the predictive values obtained using PBF for these cardiovascular RFs with the values obtained using BMI.