Approved Research

Clinical and prognostic validation of a new diagnostic criteria of sarcopenic obesity based on body composition.

Lay summary

The aims of this project are to establish an approach to diagnose a disease called sarcopenic obesity (SO). This is a condition whereby people with obesity (i.e. with increased adiposity) have a reduced muscle mass and reduced muscle function, a combination of factors which has many negative health consequences. This condition can worsen the course of many other diseases of the heart, of the liver, of diabetes, etc. Sarcopenia is an aggravating factor of the liver disease in metabolic steatosis and has been associated with increased fibrogenesis and progression to cirrhosis. Insulin resistance related to metabolic dysfunction and senescence also drives the progression of liver injury in patients with metabolic steatosis. Hence SO is part of a constellation of phenotypical changes associated with metabolic dysfunction and can impact the prognosis as an aggravating factor for liver, metabolic and cardiovascular outcomes.

It is therefore important to diagnose SO but current diagnostic methods are heterogeneous and provide very different figures. We established a new diagnostic method based on a thorough analysis of body composition in a cohort of more than 1400 individuals (overweight or obese). We would like to test this diagnostic method in the large UK Biobank as this collection would allow us to determine whether this diagnosis is related to parameters of muscle strength and function that are otherwise not available when using other datasets and also to understand whether it is associated with other health conditions and their outcome (such as myocardial infarction, cirrhosis, severe diabetes, etc).

If our diagnostic method is confirmed as a valuable tool in this independent group of individuals from the UK Biobank, we will be able to present it to the international scientific community in order to have it validated by other researchers from other countries so that it eventually becomes part of accepted the diagnostic management procedures.