A Study on Effect of Body Mass Index on Median Motor Nerve Conduction among the Young Adults and Variance in the Dominant Hands

In the recent years obesity is commonly seen in young adults, making them more prone to many diseases like hypertension, diabetes mellitus, heart diseases and musculoskeletal diseases. Obesity also affects nerves due to compression by adipose tissues. Nerve conduction study is an important test to diagnose nerve damage, demyelination and conduction blocks. This study aims to compare median motor nerve conduction between Non-obese and obese subjects and also the differences between dominant and non-dominant hand of the subjects.

Subjects were chosen based on inclusion and exclusion criteria. 60 young volunteers were chosen and were divided into two groups, controls-30 non-obese subjects and study-30 obese subjects. Motor nerve conduction test was performed in the median nerve of both hands in all the subjects.

Comparison of nerve conduction parameters in the right (dominant hand) and in left hands(non-dominant hand) between obese and non-obese shows highly significant increase in latency, decrease in amplitude and reduction in nerve conduction velocities. Comparison of the parameters between the right and left hands within the groups had no difference in nerve conduction velocity.

The results of our study make us infer that there exists a negative correlation between body weight and nerve conduction parameters thus making us to conclude that obesity affects neuronal functions.