Findings in a recent study suggest that with an increasing number of cases of obesity amongst children, BMI cannot be looked upon as the single option to administer whether the person is obese or not.

It has been exclaimed that the method has failed to estimate the actual number affected by obesity. The method is unable to determine which portion of the body carries extra weight.

Moreover, providing inaccurate statistics and leaving out a majority of the children, who are actually obese, is in turn putting their lives in risk, as obesity is major cause behind occurrence of prominent diseases, including heart problems, diabetes.

The UK-based study conducted by a team of researchers from Leeds Metropolitan University was carried out for three years and included almost 15,000 school children, aged between 11 and 12 years.

Moreover, they used three different methods to measure child obesity: BMI, waist circumference (WC), or waist-to-height ratio (WtHR).

The findings suggest that using BMI, researchers were able to identify 19-20%of boys and 16-18% of girls as obese, in comparison to 20-26% boys and 28-36% girls identified as obese using the WC and WtHR methods.

However, researchers claimed: "It is not possible to conclude the best measure of obesity, as different measurements did not relate to the chance of experiencing ill health".