Comparative Study of Bioimpedance Analysis Methods for Nutritional Assessment of COPD Patients

Abstract

Bioimpedance methods are noninvasive, simple and safe techniques for body composition estimation, which is of great interest for the nutritional assessment of patients suffering from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). This work performs a comparative study of the most common bioimpedance analysis methods and their applicability for the nutritional assessment in a set of patients with respiratory diseases. According to the results obtained in the study and taking the Bioimpedance Spectroscopy (BIS) as the reference method, it was not possible to establish a perfect quantitative correlation between the three methods analyzed, but in many cases the results were very similar. The greatest differences were found in the cases of extreme body composition. Single Frequency Bioimpedance Analysis (SFBIA) approached qualitatively the estimations related to the fat mass and the lean mass but not hydration status. Bioelectrical Impedance Vector Analysis (BIVA) method also qualitatively approached the body composition, but in this case the approximation was both in nutritional and hydration levels.