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A central fat pattern has adverse health implications in both children and adults. Because adiposity tracks from childhood into adulthood, the ability of simple anthropometric techniques to correctly measure truncal adiposity in childhood needs to be assessed.

We sought to assess the validity of waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), and the conicity index as indicators of trunk fat mass in children and adolescents.

Trunk fat mass (kg) was measured with dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry in 278 girls and 302 boys aged 3–19 y. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and areas under the curves (AUCs) for the ROCs were calculated to compare the relative abilities of the anthropometric measures to correctly identify children with high trunk fat mass (z score for our study population of ≥1).

The 80th percentile for waist circumference correctly identified 89% of girls and …