Yoshiro Onoe (graduate student) and Yasuhiro Izumiya, Kumamoto University Graduate School of Life Sciences, and colleagues found that a simple test for diagnosing muscle loss (sarcopenia) is useful for assessing the risk of aggravation of heart disease. It was clarified by a clinical study targeting patients with chronic heart failure.
Sarcopenia that causes a decrease in skeletal muscle mass and muscle strength.Although it is known to be a risk factor for the prognosis of patients with heart disease, it is recommended to perform precise skeletal muscle mass measurement using large instruments such as CT and MRI for the diagnosis of existing sarcopenia. Therefore, screening (discovery) in daily medical care has become difficult.
Under such circumstances, in recent years, the usefulness of the sarcopenia screening method using these three indicators, "age", "grip strength", and "calf thickness", without the need for large equipment, has been reported. This study at Kumamoto University has revealed that this sarcopenia screening method is also effective for patients with heart disease.The research results were published in the online version of the "International Journal of Cardiology" on April 3, 2016.
