Exploration of an alternative to body mass index to characterize the relationship between height and weight for prediction of metabolic phenotypes and cardiovascular outcomes.

Because alternative measures of body composition such as waist-to-hip ratio are not routinely collected in the clinic clinical risk models quantifying risk based on height and weight measurements alone are essential to improve practice. Compared to BMI, modeling height and weight as independent, interacting variables results in less bias and improved predictive accuracy for all tested traits. Considering an individual's height and weight opposed to BMI is a better method for quantifying individual disease risk.