Individual-typological assessment of the body fat component of the examined children and youth

Abstract

Background. Individual anatomical variability in the human body shape can be characterized by its proportions, which serve as the main components of assessing the type of human constitution.
 Aim. Establish individual typological features of the age-related changes in the fat component of the examined children, adolescents and youth.
 Material and methods. 409 residents of the Smolensk region aged 420 years were examined: 212 males and 197 females. The cohort was divided according to the International Age Periodization 1965. Studies of the longitudinal-transverse type lasted for 10 years (20102020). The research methods included anthropometry, somatodiagnostics, determination of the biological development variant. To determine the fat component, the thickness of the skin-fat folds was measured, the calculation was made according to the formulas of Ya. Mateyko. The analyzed data had a normal distribution (ShapiroWilk test). The hypothesis of statistical significance of differences was tested using Student's t-test.
 Results. Assessment of age-related changes in the body fat component of the subjects showed its continuous increase from 4 to 20 years. In female subjects it was higher, the significance of differences was established from the age of 12 (p 0.05). The fat component had a high and moderate degree of correlation with body height and weight (r=0.5330.753 and r=0.5300.833), skin-fat folds (r=0.5010.941) and body circumference (r=0.5030.790). Significant differences were established between the extreme variants of biological development (isochronic approach) (t=2.3052.604; р 0.05). In the examined males, the difference was 1012%, females 2530%. Somatotypological assessment (isosome approach) showed significant differences (t=3.4626.781; p 0.001) in the severity of fat mass in the subjects of both sexes of macrosomal and microsomal types.
 Conclusion. The conducted studies have confirmed the presence of high individualization of the fat components growth processes of male and female subjects of various somatic types and biological development variants.