Abstract

Background: The prevalence of obesity is on rise globally, which poses a risk of vascular inflammation and metabolic dysregulations. Nerve conduction is affected by altered lipid metabolism, inflammation, and oxidative stress. Motor nerve conduction velocity (NCV) is a routine electrodiagnostic technique for detecting changes in nerve conduction parameters. There are contrasting results in studies done to investigate the relationship between NCV and body mass index (BMI). Few studies show increased conduction velocity with an increase in BMI, while others found either decreased or no change in conduction velocity with change in BMI. Aims and Objectives: The objective of this study was to investigate the relationship between motor NCV and BMI.
Materials and Methods: In this study, we selected 27 individuals with normal weight, overweight, and obese categorized based on BMI and performed ulnar and median NCV. Correlation statistics were applied to see the relationship between BMI and motor NCV.
Results: We found significant positive correlation between BMI and ulnar motor NCV (P = 0.027, r = 0.43). Ulnar and median NCV was also found correlating significant (P = 0.021, r = 0.45). Conclusion: The findings of our study suggest that the NCV correlates with BMI in lower BMI groups due to the maintenance of local optimum temperature, while in people with higher BMI inflammatory changes impair nerve conduction, a comparison in larger sample size is required to substantiate this observation is required though.