Commentary: Use of the body mass index to assess the risk of health outcomes: time to say goodbye?

In this issue of the journal, Yun et al. 1 report on the association of changes in body mass index (BMI; the weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in metres) with risk of cause-specific mortality in a cohort of 473 358 Korean men aged 30–64 years at baseline. When controlled for BMI at baseline, those persons whose BMI increased moderately (between 5.0 and 9.9%) over the subsequent 6 years compared with persons with stable BMI...