ABSI calculator
How much waist you carry for your size, from your waist, height and weight, compared with adults of your age and sex. Nir Krakauer of the City College of New York and Jesse Krakauer published A Body Shape Index in 2012, building it on 14,105 American adults from the national health survey and following deaths among them for about five years. Under the result is the weight adjusted waist index, a simpler measure from Park and colleagues at Korea University, 2018.
What it measures
Bigger people have bigger waists whatever their shape, so a tape measure on its own mixes up size and shape. ABSI divides the waist by a combination of BMI and height, with exponents chosen so that across the people it was built on the result barely tracks height, weight or BMI. What is left moves with shape. In the original study, a higher score went with higher mortality separately from BMI.
ABSI = waist ÷ (BMI2/3 × height1/2), waist and height in metres
Why there are no categories here
The paper reports risk rising with the score and names no categories. The five labelled ones other ABSI calculators print, very low to very high, are the reference split into fifths with names added. The names are not in the study, so they are not on this page. You get your position among 100 adults of your age and sex and the distance from average in standard deviations, which is what the paper itself works in.
The comparison group is the one published with the study: American adults aged 18 to 85, measured in the national health survey between 1999 and 2004. Outside that age range there is nothing to compare with, so no position is shown.
Weight adjusted waist index
Park and colleagues (2018) asked the same question more simply: waist in centimetres divided by the square root of weight in kilograms. It is shown under your result. Individual studies quote cut points for their own groups, but there is no agreed one for everybody, so it is shown as a figure only.
For a check with an agreed threshold, use the waist to height ratio: keep your waist under half your height.
Common questions
What is a good ABSI score?
The study it comes from does not define one. It found that mortality risk rose with the score and named no categories. So this page tells you where you sit among adults of your age and sex, and stops there. Closer to 50 in 100 is closer to average.
Why do other ABSI calculators show five categories?
They split the reference into fifths and gave each fifth a name, from very low to very high. Those names are not in the paper. A boundary someone added afterwards looks like a finding and is not one, so this page leaves them out.
Why is my ABSI number so small?
Everyone's lands near 0.08, and the differences between people are in the third decimal place. That is why the index on its own tells you very little and is always shown against the average for your age and sex.
What is the weight adjusted waist index?
The same question by simpler arithmetic: your waist in centimetres divided by the square root of your weight in kilograms. Park and colleagues proposed it in 2018. It has no published cut points either, so it is shown as a figure only.
Sources
Every figure above comes from one of these. Check them.
- Krakauer NY, Krakauer JC (2012). A new body shape index predicts mortality hazard independently of body mass index. PLoS ONE 7(7), e39504
- Park Y, Kim NH, Kwon TY et al. (2018). A novel adiposity index as an integrated predictor of cardiometabolic disease morbidity and mortality. Scientific Reports 8, 16753
- Ashwell M, Gunn P, Gibson S (2012). Waist-to-height ratio is a better screening tool than waist circumference and BMI for adult cardiometabolic risk factors: systematic review and meta-analysis. Obesity Reviews 13(3), 275-286
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This is not medical advice. Body Numbers is a calculator. It does not diagnose, treat or monitor any condition, and no number it produces should replace a conversation with a doctor or a dietitian. If a result worries you, or if you are pregnant, unwell, or under eighteen, speak to a health professional.
