Prevalence of Obesity After Spinal Cord Injury

Obesity is a growing problem, even among people with spinal cord injuries (SCI). It's important to figure out how common obesity is after an SCI and how it affects health, including mortality rates. Current ways of measuring obesity, like body mass index (BMI), might not be accurate for people with SCI because their body composition changes after the injury. After an SCI, people tend to lose muscle and gain fat. Because of these changes, regular BMI measurements may not be correct. This can result in missing people who are really obese, even if their BMI looks normal. This review looks at existing research to understand how common obesity is in people with SCI. It highlights the need to adjust how obesity is measured in this group. It also emphasizes that we need more research to understand how factors like injury level, age, and ethnicity play a role in obesity after SCI.

• 1
  Obesity prevalence may be underestimated or unclearly defined following SCI due to the lack of a valid differential tool.
• 2
  BMI criteria do not correspond to the same degree of fatness in the SCI population due, in large part, to differences in body composition and specifically fat-free mass.
• 3
  Individuals with SCI experienced greater reduction in their sympathetic activity compared to healthy individuals, which likely contributes further to lower resting metabolism.