Appropriate Asian body mass indices?

139 Editorial Appropriate Asian body mass indices? contributed greatly to the original Hong Kong meeting, was tragically killed; we trust that this supplement will go some way to meeting his demands for a rigorous scientific approach to medical innovations. We are grateful to the Roche Company for an educational grant to some of the authors and support for meetings to discuss this project. obesity reviews This issue of Obesity Reviews is the outcome of a preliminary meeting organized in Hong Kong, in 1999, in conjunction with the World Health Organization (WHO), The International Association for the Study of Obesity and the International Obesity TaskForce. This meeting considered the appropriateness of the classification of obesity in Asians at the WHO Expert Technical Consultation for Obesity held in Geneva in June 1997 (1). The Hong Kong meeting led to the proposal that adult overweight could be specified in Asia when the body mass index (BMI) exceeded 23.0 and that obesity should be specified when the BMI exceeded 25.0 (2). At that stage there was only a modest amount of evidence on obesity and the high rates of comor-bidities in Asians published in the English literature. Chinese scientists have since undertaken meta-analyses on BMI and its disease risks, and a proposal for BMI cutoffs for overweight and obesity specifically for Chinese adults has been made. These analyses will be published in English in the near future. This issue of Obesity Reviews therefore presents new analyses of data from China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia and Singapore to allow comparisons with Western literature. During the final phase of producing this issue, Professor Julian Critchley, who