Monday, September 6, 2021 - Episode 422
By: Leslyn Keith, OTD, CLT-LANA
Bioimpedance for Lipedema & Dercums
- Today I’d like to tell you about a paper by Rachelle Crescenzi and colleagues.
- The paper is called: Lipedema and Dercum’s Disease: A New Application of Bioimpedance.
- It was published in the peer-reviewed journal Lymphatic Research and Biology in August 2019.
- In this study, a bioimpedance device was used to estimate how much fluid there was in different body regions in each of the study participants.
- The authors hypothesized that there would be different fluid properties between lipedema and Dercum’s Disease and that testing using bioimpedance would detect these differences.
- This paper is important for women with lipedema because early diagnosis of lipedema at or around stage 1 is particularly difficult due to lack of awareness of lipedema as a medical condition.
- Identifying early objective tissue composition changes may help to diagnose lipedema in the early stages.
- Using bioimpedance may also be a tool to help the clinician distinguish between lipedema and Dercum’s Disease and also to identify if the conditions are co-occurring.