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Varna Medical Forum

Imaging methods used in diagnosing sarcopenia

Dimitrina Markova, Georgi Valchev

Abstract

Sarcopenia is a developing concept that encompasses loss of muscle mass and function. It is primarily associated with advancing age and chronic disease. Sarcopenia is currently regarded as a patient-specific biomarker with prognostic value for clinical and surgical outcomes. Contemporary medical imaging approaches for establishing the diagnosis of sarcopenia are based on the assessment of muscle mass. This includes the following modalities: dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA), computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance (MR), and ultrasound (US). All of these methods can, to a varying degree, deliver quantitative data that is reproducible and comparable in time. DEXA is the most widely available method in clinical practice, with advantages such as accessibility, automatization of the measurement, as well as widely accepted normal value ranges. CT and MR are considered to be referent standards; both allow planimetric and volumetric quantification of muscle and fatty tissue. They necessitate the manual intervention of a human operator and come at a higher cost. US is a universally available non-ionizing imaging method, which, however, finds limited application in the diagnosis of sarcopenia (primarily in assessing thigh musculature). US is a universally available non-ionizing method, which, however, finds limited application in the diagnosis of sarcopenia (mainly in the evaluation of the thigh musculature) due to the heavy dependence of the examination on the operator as well as the resulting difficult reproducibility and the unpredictable limitations of the acoustic window.

Keywords

DEXA, CT, MR, US, sarcopenia

Full Text


References

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14748/vmf.v12i1.8774

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