Abstract:
Background: Overweight or obesity is an excessive fat accumulation that impairs the health and wellbeing of the
adult population throughout the world. Recently Mid upper arm circumference (MUAC) was suggested as a
screening index for overweight or obesity among adolescents, but its utilization for the assessment of overweight
or obesity in the adult population is not clear yet. In addition, little is known about the screening ability of MUAC
for overweight or obesity in the adult population of Ethiopia. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the utility of
MUAC for screening overweight or obesity among adult employees of Mizan Tepi University, Southwest Ethiopia.
Method: A Facility -based cross-sectional study was carried out from February 21 to March 20, 2020, at Mizan Tepi
University. About 585 study participants were selected by gender-based stratified sampling technique. Anthropometric data like weight, height, and MUAC were collected. Pearson's correlation between MUAC, body mass
index (BMI), and age was calculated to see a relationship between them. The Receiver operating characteristics
(ROC) curve was calculated to identify the screening ability of MUAC for overweight or obesity. The appropriate
MUAC cutoff point for both men and women established using the Youden index. Additionally, sensitivity,
specificity, positive, and negative predictive values were calculated.
Result: The prevalence of overweight and obesity among the study participants was 18.1% and 4.8%, respectively.
MUAC had a strong positive correlation with BMI, r ¼ 0.65 (95% CI; 0.56–0.69). According to ROC analysis,
MUAC is an excellent screening tool for male and female employees with excellent accuracy (AUC ¼ 0.9 with
91.4% sensitivity and 76.4% specificity) and good accuracy (AUC ¼ 0.83 with 67.2% sensitivity and 83.5%
specificity), respectively. Based on the youden index, the cutoff point of MUAC to screen overweight or obesity
among male and female employees was 26.91cm.
Conclusion: Mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC) has an equal ability with BMI to screen overweight or obesity
among adults. Therefore, MUAC can be utilized as an alternative index to screen overweight and obesity in
resource-limited setups.
