At the Sahoury Medical Institute we offer a state of the art service for those who are serious about improving their health, getting into shape and staying there.
This scan is for 3 main groups of people:
- Professional and recreational athletes, bodybuilders.
- Personal training clients – those monitoring their fitness programs
- Weight Loss Patients
"Whether you are an athlete monitoring your training or an everyday person trying to lose weight, DEXA is a valuable tool to structure your exercise and dietary program."
By understanding how your muscle, fat, and bone react to lifestyle changes, you’ll be able to improve weight loss, create a highly targeted exercise program, and reduce your chance of heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity.
A DEXA whole body composition scan measures body fat, bone and lean mass to a very high degree of accuracy and precision. This allows small changes in fat and lean/muscle tissue to be detected over relatively short time frames, which makes it ideal for tracking the progress of your program. You will also be able to see changes in individual regions of the arms, legs and trunk as well as the whole body.
"The scan also gives you your overall fat and muscle percentage and composition. This will indicate whether you are in a healthy range for your age."
DEXA works by passing a fine, very low dose x-ray beam through the tissues of the body to a detector array.These x-rays are blocked or attenuated relative to the density of the tissues they are penetrating. Bone, fat and lean(muscle) tissue all have characteristic densities which can be used to calculate the relative masses of each of the three components in any given region.
Undergoing a full body DEXA scan is as simple as lying on a table for less than 10 minutes. You stay fully clothed throughout the process, and the non-invasive scan is completely pain free.
The use and safety of DEXA is well proven. More than 70% of pharmaceutical clinical trials currently utilise DEXA technology, while DEXA body composition assessment is proving highly beneficial in advanced clinical weight loss trials. To date, over 2000 research papers have used DEXA for body composition assessment purposes. DEXA results are also commonly used to show intermediate outcomes in many Nutrition and Metabolic Disorder studies. This widespread acceptance has helped DEXA technology achieve a gold standard for ease of use, accuracy and test/ retest repeatability.
DEXA is significantly more accurate than underwater weighing, Bodpod, bioelectrical impedance and skinfold(calipers) measure.