This book is the compilation of papers presented at the International
Symposium on In Vivo Body Composition Studies, held in Houston, Texas,
November 10-12, 1992. The purpose of this conference was to report on
the state-of-the-art techniques for in vivo body composition
measurements and to present the most recent human data on normal body
composition and changes during disease. This conference was the third in
a series of meetings on body composition studies held in North America,
and follows the successful meetings at Brookhaven National Laboratory in
1986, and the one in Toronto in 1989. A large number of excellent
research papers were offered for consideration at this Conference which
demonstrates the rapid growth of the field in the last three years.
However, we had to limit the presentations to approximately 90 papers
which provided a broad spectrum of the applications and recent interest
in the subject. The proceedings of the Brookhaven meeting "In Vivo Body
Composition Studies", is published by The Institute of Physical Sciences
in Medicine, London. The proceedings of the Toronto meeting "In Vivo
Body Composition Studies" was published by Plenum Press in its basic
life science series. Both these meetings placed more emphasis on
technical aspects while the current Houston meeting tried to emphasize
more the emerging clinical applications of these techniques. The general
sessions used at the Conference for presentations forms the basis of the
order of appearance of the papers in this book.
