Monday, September 6, 2021 – Episode 422

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.